“You must write every single day of your life.” -Ray Bradbury

I haven’t always heeded his advice, but I do believe Bradbury was correct. If you want to be a writer, if you want to improve your craft, if you want to succeed in this creative endeavor, you must write every day, or at least on a consistent basis that you follow through with week by week.

This can be so difficult to achieve, especially for writers who haven’t yet achieved the level of success required to quit their day jobs. For most of us, life’s demands rarely cease long enough to carve out a decent amount of time for daily writing. We’re up with the rising sun to make oatmeal and find shoes and usher the kids to school, and then it’s off to work, where we spend eight or so hours not writing or even thinking about writing. When we get home in the evening, there is dinner to make and bills to pay and homework to help with and dishes to wash, and by the time we’re done with it all, we’re too exhausted to write. So how are we supposed to give ourselves that precious time each day to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard?

The secret is to make writing a habit.

You don’t struggle to find the time to put your shoes on in the morning, do you? You don’t have to remind yourself to eat or shower or brush your teeth, right? (Okay, maybe you do. You are, after all, a writer, and we are such easily distracted creatures. But bear with me.)

There are things you already do on a daily basis, without having to remind yourself to do them, without feeling pressed for time. They are fully ingrained habits, as natural as breathing. You can make writing one of these daily habits. Even ten minutes a day spent fully engaged in the act of creation is more productive, in the long run, than sporadic bursts of energy “whenever you have the time”. So develop the habit. It might be hard at first, but it will pay off big time in the long run, as you crank out more and more and better material.

How you do this will depend to some extent on what kind of writer you are. Some writers prefer to schedule in a regular amount of time each day to write. They feel that word count goals are stressful, and when they’re stressed out, they can’t write. That’s fine. Others prefer to establish a goal of a specific number of words to be written each day because if they only schedule a block of time, they will probably waste it all pondering or dithering or checking Facebook. That’s also fine. Figure out what works for you, set your goal, and stick with it.

Start with a substantial, but achievable goal, like 300 words or a half-hour of ass-in-chair time per day. As time goes on and the words pile up, you can move the goal post farther to increase your daily output.

If you already have a daily writing habit cemented into your routine, congratulations. Your next step will be to check in and see if your writing habit needs any modifications or improvements to serve you better.

Once you’ve figured out your daily goal, give some thought to how you will achieve it. Key considerations are location and time of day.

Time of Day

If you work a 9-5, but you live alone, writing in the evening when you get home from work can work quite well. If you have a family, your working day probably extends several hours after you get home from the job, so you might want to commit to rising an hour or so earlier to squeeze in a block of uninterrupted writing time before everyone else wakes up. If you have the hectic, inconsistent work schedule of an on-call nurse or a live sound engineer, then God help you. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something out.

Location

Now that you’ve decided on a time of day, you should choose a place that will be conducive to sitting down and making words. Some folks have an office or a study. If you do, that seems a very appropriate place. If you don’t, you’ll need to be creative. If you work well surrounded by activity, you can try the local coffee shop, though that might get expensive. If you need total solitude and quiet to write, stick a desk or table in the corner of your bedroom and shut the door.

Just don’t let lack of a dedicated writing space keep you from writing. Stephen King wrote his debut novel Carrie at a child’s desk in the laundry room of his doublewide trailer. A friend of mine used to write on her smartphone screen in the subway during the hour-long commute to work each morning. I myself have written several short stories in the driver’s seat of my car, because it’s quiet and there’s no internet access.

Special Accommodations

To best support yourself in your goal of developing a daily writing habit, you may need to make some refinements to your lifestyle or writing process. These can range from schedule adjustments, like going to bed earlier or bowing out of after work get-togethers with coworkers, to household rearrangements, like moving your desk into a quieter space in the house. You might need to cut down on your time spent engaging on social media or binge-watching Netflix. Or you might have to gather your family together for a lecture on the virtues of letting the resident writer write. Implementing these changes might pose a bit of temporary discomfort. But whatever special accommodations you give yourself now will prove worthwhile later, when you’re sitting behind a finished novel or gazing at an inbox full of glowing comments from your fans (and the occasional death threat—hey, if you’re not pissing anyone off, you’re not doing anything important!)

Contingency Plans

People get sick. Laptops crash. Cars break down. Life happens. There will be days when you find you just can’t meet your goal. That’s okay, as long as you don’t let it stop you from continuing ever onward to that great, gilded writer’s desk on the horizon.

It might behoove you to go ahead and create contingency plans for yourself, just in case you wake up one morning to a house full of vomiting children, or your trusty ol’ MacBook won’t crank up. Or in case there’s a zombie apocalypse. Will you skip that day and double your word count the next? Or just write a few paragraphs during lunch? Whatever you do, don’t let little hiccups like zombie apocalypses keep you from finishing your writing projects!

Activity

Taking into account your work schedule and daily obligations, determine what your daily word count goal will be, and where and when you will write. If you already have a daily writing habit, ask yourself if your current output is sufficient, or if it needs fine tuning. Do you need to increase your daily word count? Or switch from time-spent-in-chair to words-written, or vice versa? Is your current word count asking too much of you, so that you are constantly down on yourself for not achieving it?

If you have a normal 9-5 job, you might decide to give yourself a lower word count on week days, and a higher one on weekends when you have more time to write. If you’re the stay-at-home parent of a toddler or two, it might work well for you to give yourself a daily goal of one-hour of writing time (when the kids are taking their naps), and pay a babysitter to get a larger chunk of writing time one day a week. Feel free to play with your daily word count goal, tweaking it to suit whatever is going on in your life at the moment.

The most important thing is not how much you write, it’s that you keep writing.

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Hi! I'm Starr, and I write funny stuff, musings, and stuff about writing here on Steemit, along with the occasional anarchist ranting.

The above is an excerpt of a project I've been working on for awhile--a yearly planner for writers, with advice in the front to help writers in their pursuit of greater productivity. I'd love it if you'd let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading!

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