This year, I decided I would write a thousand words every weekday. The goal is to have the first draft of something publishable by the middle of the year, and I think I’m on my way toward that.
It has become a kind of meme that writers will do anything except write, and I can see why. I spent the last several years not writing at all except for work and the occasional blog post or freewrite exercise, and I can tell you there is always a lot of internal resistance to sitting down to write. I get it. It’s a challenge.
It’s a challenge that, if the last two months are any evidence, can be overcome.
Here are my thoughts on writing daily. I’m recording them here in case anyone else finds them helpful.
Accountability
Probably the most important thing that has helped me this year is setting myself up to be accountable for my daily writing. For me, this entails creating a daily post on Facebook. By making my writing efforts public, I make myself accountable to whoever will see those posts.
And people do see them, even if they don’t interact with them. I’ve had numerous people come up to me and tell me they enjoy my writing posts, and I tell them to get on my case about it if they ever see me stop posting them. Most of these people never interact with the posts themselves, but knowing they’re watching for them is one of the main factors that gets me to make myself sit down and write something every day.
Set Out to Create Useless Garbage
The second thing that has helped me is ditching the need to make sure I’m writing something good. Often as writers, we’ll sit down to an empty page called Draft 1 and try to type out only things that are relevant to that draft. We have an idea for the kind of art we want to create and focus on trying to force that specific creation out of ourselves. If an idea comes to mind that doesn’t seem like it relates to what we’re making, we push past it in an effort to make what we think we should be making.
The end result is frequently paralysis. It’s hard to make the words go if they’re not the words currently stirring your heart.
My solution has been to set out every day to create useless garbage. Sort of.
Most of my writing right now takes place in a document called Freewrites 2024. It’s a place I can just dump whatever is in my head that day. No one will ever see this document, so I’m free to do what I want with it.
Of course, I try to make stuff that I think is going to be cool, but there’s no pressure for that to happen. It doesn’t have to be relevant to anything. It doesn’t even have to be legible. I just have to write.
The funny thing is I’ll frequently end up with something I can actually use. It all comes back into the kind of fiction I want to eventually publish, which is in part due to the next point.
Start with the Evocative and Build Out
I often listen to dungeon synth music while writing since it has the kinds of vibes I want my work to convey. Some days, it’s hard to get into that headspace, and the music helps.
Why does the music help?
It helps because it’s evocative.
If I have no idea what to write, sometimes I’ll sit and let whatever images the music inspires come into my head. I describe the image in writing, and that eventually morphs into something more. Asking “Why?” and “What next?” as the image unfolds helps me tie it into a story, often the one I’m working on, which is something I could never do reliably if I just sat down with the intention of continuing that story from the get go.
From evocative images and ideas, I create a piecemeal of scenes and concepts that I can eventually combine into a cohesive narrative. At least, that’s the hope. It seems to be working so far. If nothing else, it seems like an effective way to avoid getting bored with your writing.
Read Lots
In conjunction with my daily writing, I made the goal to read a book every month. Reading feeds words into your head, and that helps create a repository you can draw upon while writing. Read the kinds of things you want to write, and you should have an easier time putting words on the page once you get started each day.
So far, the books I’ve read this year are The Book of Q by Jonathan Rabb and The Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana. The Book of Q is very good at making you think in ways you’ve never thought before, and I feel like Rabb’s way of expressing ideas helped me actually have a vocabulary while writing. The Library of Fates has some really interesting twists in it that kind of throw you for an existential loop, which is something I kind of want to do at some point. Check them out if you’re interested!
Take Breaks
Finally, don’t make yourself write all the time. There’s a reason my plan was to write only on weekdays. I take weekends off, and that has actually helped with motivation some weeks. If I know I can take a break tomorrow, it’s easier to make myself write today.
It’s important to rest as well as to work.
What Helps You Write Every Day?
Those are my thoughts on (nearly) daily writing. If you find anything useful here, go ahead and run with it! If you have any other ideas on daily writing that work for you, let me know in the comments.
Really, I think the ultimate key is this: feed your brain stuff you like, and then write stuff you like. That may require you to ignore the bulk of writing advice people peddle on the internet, which is fine. There’s no such thing as a “correct” piece of fiction, after all. You just have to like it enough to keep writing it.
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