Useful Ways to Keep Writing Every Day


Scrolling through my Facebook feed, a post caught my eye. A fellow writer wrote that for weeks she had been writing every day, producing quality blog posts without any difficulty. Then she took a short break from writing daily, and the spell was broken. Toronto SEO Expert She wrote that coming back to writing after the break had been tough. She could no longer produce the quality work as easily as before and now found it difficult to find inspiration. 

I’m not alone in attributing her success to her daily writing habit. Many successful writers say that the key to their success also lies in their dedication to sitting down every day and putting words down on paper.“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.”—Ray Bradbury
What you stand to gain from committing to a daily writing practice has a lot to do with preparing you for the work of writing professionally. As with a lot of creative endeavours, much of this is about changing your mindset, building resilience, and preparing for imperfection.


Shift Your Focus, Change Your Mindset

It’s easy to write when you’re feeling inspired and motivated, but what about those days when you aren’t feeling inspired or motivated?
You’ve got a blank page, a blinking cursor, and a wandering mind.
It would be easy, in these moments, to turn your mind to other tasks like social media, editorial planning, research, or browsing the web and following link after link into oblivion until you have other responsibilities to take care of. These are the moments when all writers need to push through and just get some words out. It always gets easier once you’ve started.
Committing to writing every day takes away any power that first blank moment holds over you because you’re not focused on writing the next Pulitzer Prize winner; you’re focused on writing something every day. That’s all. Just words on the page, every day.
A well established creative habit is going to shift your focus and change the way you view your writing. You move away from the idea that to write you must be inspired toward the idea that to write you must simply show up and write.
“Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they’ll tell you the truth:They don’t know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing. Every day.”—Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist


Build Resilience and Create Small Wins

Your daily writing habit is not only about producing words. It’s also about keeping you going, keeping your head in the game, and helping you build resilience.
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”—Jim Rohn
What do you need resilience for? As creators, we face a lot of self-imposed obstacles. Sometimes, we see our lack of inspiration as a sign we have nothing to say. We focus on all the reasons why words aren’t coming easily to us that day. If what we write is disappointing, we might see our lacklustre writing as proof we’re no good. There’s likely to be some negative backchat from our inner censor. We fear, we fret, and we falter.
“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”—William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Without an established daily writing habit to help us push through and keep going, we’re much more likely to give up. And, as with the Facebook post lady, the spell is broken. We’ll have to face the blank page and those same obstacles again the next day.
This is what resilience is for, to help us get through these horrific days. This is when a daily writing habit will pull you through. Doing creative work is tough. Putting your heart and soul into something can take a lot out of you.
Give yourself what Charles Duhigg refers to as “small wins.” In “The Power of Habit,” he writes, “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.”
Writing every day will help you build creative resilience, but it will also give you small daily wins. A way for you to say, “Today, I wrote!” and move closer to your goals.


Get Used to Imperfection

The other thing that’s important to remember about your daily writing habit is that it’s not about producing good writing every day. If you do, bonus! But it’s not likely. You have to be willing to write crap for the sake of getting your writing done. You’re creating a habit, not a work of art every day.
“You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly … Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.”—Jennifer Egan
In one of my favourite writing books, “Bird by Bird,” Anne Lamott says: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”
If your fear of writing badly is preventing you from writing anything at all, you need to remind yourself that not all the writing you do is for publication. Some of it is in service of your daily writing habit.
A great way to write every day is to try different types of writing exercises or tasks. These tasks can be for “priming the pump” or ideation. They don’t all have to result in writing you can publish. I like to call these types of writing tasks my refuge actions because they are small, risk-free actions I can take to keep writing every day and keep moving toward my goals.
With the right mindset and a few refuge actions to fall back on, you can turn “writer’s block” days into productive writing days that fuel other writing projects and keep your daily writing habit alive.
Here are a few suggestions for refuge actions or perspectives to help you get some writing done and keep your creative momentum.


Morning Pages

Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages is my personal refuge action and a great strategy to get words on a page without having the pressure of something specific to write like a blog post or a novel. It’s a lot like journaling.
Morning Pages is one of the main creative tools Cameron recommends in her book “The Artist’s Way,” and it is simply writing a minimum of three pages every morning. This isn’t “important” writing—the pages serve as a safe place to get all your worries and thoughts out of your head so you can move on with other work unencumbered. This is for-your-eyes-only writing, and you can do whatever you want with them. Don’t be held back.
“There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can’t be a writer if you’re not a reader. It’s the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it’s for only half an hour—write, write, write.”—Madeleine L’Engle
Morning Pages or journaling is a great place to start your day. With a clear mind, you can move on to freewriting or working on your other writing projects. Every now and then, I encounter gems within these pages. Beyond its value as an exercise to loosen the mind and fingers, morning pages or journaling can offer up great sentences or ideas you can use elsewhere.


Freewriting

Try freewriting by hand to explore your ideas and your writing style. Doing it by hand is important because it helps you activate parts of your brain that typing doesn’t. It’s like journaling in that you are letting whatever comes to mind flow onto the page. But it’s also an opportunity to explore your thoughts about a topic you’re writing about and work through what you’ve learned about that topic from other sources.
You can use freewriting to think on paper—get to the crux of what you want to say before you start writing your article. And it counts toward your daily writing. I discuss freewriting in greater detail in this post.


Shitty First Drafts

Start with a shitty first draft. You aren’t the only writer to have written less than perfect prose, and you won’t be the last, so start every project with a first draft you don’t have lofty expectations for.
Like an artist, start with some rough sketches. Later, you’ll come back and build it up, layer upon layer, improving it until you have something you’re ready to release into the world.
In the beginning, it doesn’t matter if it’s any good. You’ll edit, pick apart, or completely discard what you’ve written at a later stage. That’s OK; that’s the process. But you have to start somewhere, and it helps to approach your writing without judgment or expectations.


Photography

As bloggers or digital content creators, whether you’re into photography or not, we all have to find that perfect image to complement our words. In doing so, I found that good photography can be a great inspiration for words.
I use Unsplash for my blog photography. The images are stunning and creative. The photographers contributing to Unsplash are talented, passionate, and pushing their creative bounds. The result is a collection of gorgeous images that are bursting with story. Often, just scrolling through Unsplash sparks ideas for me. Use photography for inspiration or writing prompts.
Other forms of art can be inspiring too, and it’s a great idea to explore other mediums. Check out other artists’ work and see what it conjures inside you.
In his book “Steal Like An Artist,” Austin Kleon talks about the importance of looking to other artists and the world around you for inspiration.
“Every artist gets asked the question, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’
The honest artist answers, ‘I steal them.’”—Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist


Take a Walk or Read a Book

Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself when you feel uninspired is to go do something else. You could go enjoy others’ art or try your hand at another art form yourself. I recommend going for a walk or reading a book.
“If you can’t write, read. If you can’t read, walk. Or walk and read, then write.”—Joyce Rachelle
I get all my best ideas while I’m walking. I don’t know if it’s the exercise, the fresh air, or the new scenery, but something about getting out for a walk always gives me a burst of energy. I often listen to podcasts on the way, and I’ve found that I make a lot of connections from the podcast content and other things I’ve been thinking about that result in ideas for my writing. If I don’t feel like writing, I often read for a while. It gets me in the right headspace. Reading great writing has a way of inspiring you to write. It’s also the best way to learn to write, so pay close attention to your favourite authors’ writing.
Walking and reading are things you can do to reset your mind and your mood, but remember, you still have to come back and write.


Takeaway

If you want to write well consistently, you must write every day. It’s a creative habit you cultivate not just to get your writing projects done but to build resilience and arm yourself with strategies for those days when you’re struggling to write or fighting self-doubt.
Any amount of writing will do. It can be writing you do for yourself or for publication. It can be exploratory, preparatory, or first draft writing. The only thing that matters is that every day you write something and you keep doing it until your day feels incomplete without having written words. Then you’re on to something.

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