Transcription
For the past 3 years, 6 months, and 4 days, I've been writing every single day. I've struggled in the past with being a consistent writer. Maybe you do, too. And I honestly thought I might never get there.
But, the truth is that you don't need superhuman willpower or perfectly scheduled calendar to write for 1,200 days in a row. The method I've found is a realistic, sustainable, and importantly, enjoyable way to make progress in your writing every day. At the core of this method is the five-sentence rule, your secret weapon against writer's block and the key to staying on track no matter what.
I probably don't need to convince you that consistency is one of the most powerful and essential skills a writer can cultivate. Some of the world's most successful authors are famous for their discipline. Stephen King aims to write at least 2,000 words daily. [music] Starting at the age of 12, Ray Bradbury wrote every single day for over 70 years. If you want to write more or take your skills to the next level, building a consistent writing habit may be the best thing you can do for yourself as a writer. Here's how you do it.
Okay, I'll level with you. There's nothing magical about the five-sentence rule. It doesn't need to be five sentences. I just picked that because it sounds good. A more accurate name for the rule I usually follow is the 100-word rule, but that's not quite as catchy. The fundamental idea, though, is what's most important. It's having a bar low enough that you can pass it on days when nothing is going according to plan. Five sentences is a very low minimum. So is 100 words. It's not aspirational, it's a break glass in case of emergency target.
On average days, this minimum goal serves as an on-ramp into the flow state. Sitting down at the page to meet your daily threshold gets you working on the project. And once you've started, you might just keep going. We're not machines, after all. We don't stop after exactly 100 words. The floor, however high or low you set it, is nothing more than a launchpad for a longer writing session.
Inertia is a fundamental law of the universe. An object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. If day after day you never get around to writing, thinking about writing won't change anything. You have to do something, exert real force to break out of a creative standstill. Once you get the ball rolling, especially once you've built a sizable streak, you'll actually find it hard to stop. The momentum will be undeniable.
The goal is to make writing every day a habit as ingrained and indispensable as brushing your teeth. I've been doing this long enough that I can't go to bed without having written something. I know something's off if I try to. The psychological power of a streak is strong. I would know. I have a 1,711 day Duolingo streak, which yes, is over a year longer than my writing streak. Part of the reason it's so effective is that it taps into loss aversion, our brain's natural bias against losing things we've earned. No matter how annoying it might be to force yourself to write at the end of a long day when all you want to do is fall asleep, your reluctance to break a streak you've spent so long building is stronger than your discomfort. Speaking from experience here.
Visualizing your streak is a helpful motivator. This can be as simple as marking a physical calendar or as complex as a custom writing tracker in Notion connected to a habit streaks database with formulas for displaying stats. Guess which one I use. Whatever tracking method you go with, keep it clearly visible. When you can see the writing streak you've built, you'll be all the more motivated to keep it going.
It wouldn't be much of a stretch to call consistency a superpower. By putting in work every single day over an extended period of time, you'll end up making significant progress without burning out. The amount you write on any given day might not look like a lot, but it adds up. After a few months or years of consistent writing, you might be shocked at the cumulative output. Thanks to writing fiction and journaling every day last year, I wrote more words than in any previous year by margin of over 100,000 words.
Not only does a consistent writing habit help you write more, but it also helps eliminate overwhelm. Writing a novel is an intimidating task. I've written nine and I still find it overwhelming when I'm staring at a blank page thinking of the long road to completion. Part of the magic of writing every day is that it forces you to take your mind off the big picture. Instead of fantasizing about the brilliant ending of your book or worrying about its eventual critical reception, you have to actually write the words.
Writing daily also turns down the pressure to produce something stellar. You don't have to write perfect sentences. You just have to write sentences. In the past, when I returned to writing a book after a month-long hiatus, I would feel burdened by my own expectations. I have to come back with something exceptional or I can't start writing again until I know exactly what should happen next. These are excuses, but they sound reasonable when you're out of practice. When writing is instead as routine as getting out of bed in the morning, you simply can't afford to be so precious about it. And in all likelihood, you'll realize that the words you write on days that don't feel special can be just as good as the words you write when you feel a flame with inspiration. Your transitory emotions, preconceptions, and worries don't seem as important when writing is something you've made habitual.
This does mean that some days what you write will be hot garbage. I track my writing sessions and there have been times I've made apologetic notes for a session about how unusable what I wrote is. That's fine. If you want to take writing seriously, you have to be willing to produce some seriously bad writing. On the whole, of course, writing every day will improve your skills. More than that, it will teach you about yourself as a writer.
Making a daily habit out of writing is the perfect opportunity to experiment, especially if you track various factors about your writing sessions like duration, word count, time of day, and environment, you can learn a lot about what works best for you. I keep a record of every writing session, whether I'm standing or sitting, listening to music or not, what scene I was writing, how many words I wrote, and when I wrote. This is probably overkill for most writers. I'd only wholeheartedly recommend this if you're into data like I am. But even if you're not literally tracking every time you write, the daily repetition of the habit will start to reveal your general preferences, what works and what doesn't. Maybe you're a morning writer, or a night owl, or listening to the perfect playlist is the fastest way for you to get into the writing headspace. All good information to have.
Philosophically speaking, building consistency is about building trust in yourself. [snorts] When you show up day in and day out to do something good, even if it's something as simple as writing stories, you're proving your own competence and commitment to yourself. So establishing a writing habit can build your confidence, not only as a writer, but as a capable person across domains.
Life can be messy. Even the most carefully laid plans inevitably form cracks upon contact with reality. Expecting you'll have the same time every day to write would be deeply naive. In the face of life's unpredictability, the most important quality you can adopt when trying to establish a daily habit is flexibility. If you miss a day, don't let that spell the end of your consistency. Make it up the next day with an extra writing session, or give yourself free passes to use when needed. You don't want to be too lenient here. At a certain point, reasonable exceptions turn into indulgent excuses, but having extraordinarily strict rules can backfire. For instance, if I've had a long packed day, I sometimes can't get around to writing until after midnight. Technically the next day, but not in my book. As long as I'm still awake, I count it as the day I woke up in. For my daily journaling practice, if I reach the end of a day and I'm too tired to write out everything that happened in detail, I'll write a sentence or two, maybe a few bullet points, and fill in the rest later when I have time.
It's worth mentioning Goodhart's law here, the principle that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. There's an inherent danger in setting any particular metric as a target, since it can ultimately incentivize the wrong kind of action. If you use time spent writing as your goal, you might spend 15 minutes writing five words and consider your daily writing done. Alternatively, if you've set a word count goal, you might knowingly type unusable dreck just to quickly meet your target. It's okay to write bad prose, but you shouldn't find yourself doing so intentionally. Setting a suitable daily target requires self-knowledge and adjusting as needed based on actual experience. Depending on your level of ambition or whether you have a strict deadline to meet, you might want to impose a higher daily word count threshold or you could have a target number that's higher than the minimum word count, which you'll only set out to surpass on days when you have enough time.
Again, unless you live an extraordinarily well-managed and predictable life, some days will be much better suited to writing than others. I should also point out the obvious. I'm a 21-year-old with no kids and a high degree of control over my time. Writing consistently can be harder if you're managing a family or other time-consuming responsibilities. In such circumstances, flexibility and lowering the bar are all the more important. And remember that you don't need a large block of time dedicated to writing every day. It can be 10 minutes of writing on your phone while on the subway or a few paragraphs started down over lunch.
If you're writing something heavy or that you have high expectations for, I highly recommend having a secondary project you can switch to when needed. Maybe it's a short story in an entirely different genre or an experimental draft with no definite outcome in mind. With Catalyst of Control, my upcoming sci-fi novel, the scope and complexity were a little too much on some days, hence why I've written three novellas since I started writing it. A change of pace can help keep your creative spark alive.
One of the challenges you'll doubtless face if you write every day is boredom or a lack of inspiration. Some days you really won't feel like writing, but you'll have to do it anyway. Part of you might object to this. Shouldn't writing be fun or sacred or spontaneous? It can be those things, but it won't always be. A counterintuitive truth about creativity is that most of the time it looks boring. If you want to be prolific or if you want to make a career in the arts, you have to do the work even when you feel uninspired. It can be tedious, putting down one word after the other, wondering if it'll amount to anything. I've made a habit of writing every day because I know putting in the reps is what it takes to attain a high level of skill in this craft. There are days when it feels like a task to be checked off a to-do list rather than the ecstatic fulfillment of my cosmic purpose. There's always something more immediately appealing, something easier, something that doesn't require the effort of creating something out of nothing. And yet, I do it anyway.
The real problem isn't boredom or lack of inspiration. It's our relationship with these feelings, a relationship that tends to sour and calcify as we age. I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I had far fewer things to distract myself with. I wasn't on social media, I didn't read the news, I almost never watched television. And so, I felt compelled to create my own entertainment. It was joyous, fun on a much deeper level than simply consuming content. I could spin grand tales out of thin air. I could escape from mundane reality into a universe of my own creation. There's nothing like it, that spark of imagination, that drive to create, the pure act of writing. Mundus ex nihilo. You create worlds out of nothing. But that nothingness, that vacancy, has to exist first. [music] When it does, you'll find yourself instinctively drawn to create something to fill it. Nature abhors a vacuum, so does a creative mind. Give a painter a blank canvas and they'll start thinking about what colors they could drench it in. Set a writer in front of a blank page and they'll set to work brainstorming stories and sentences. [music]
The problem is that facing that blankness, allowing ourselves to be truly bored, is uncomfortable. Modernity provides us with a bevy of easy distractions to instantly circumvent boredom. [music] Add to that our societal obsession with productivity and any time spent in boredom feels gratuitous, unjustifiable, even painful. The task of an artist is to return to that childlike state of creativity and wonder. To look at even the mundane through fresh and curious eyes. >> [music] >> To face the page and write, even when it feels like staring at a wall would be a more appealing task. We live in a world full of distractions. Our attention is pulled in a million different directions. To make the time every day to shut it all out and write is a small act of rebellion, a reclaiming of time and space for our creativity. It's a challenge, but an important one to take on. Habits shape our lives. Make a habit out of writing and you'll be shaping your life for the better, one day at a time.
For more videos on writing, subscribe. If you want to support my work, get behind the scenes updates, and even read my older books, you can become a patron. If you join at the higher tier, you'll get access to six novels, three novellas, five short films, and unreleased music by yours truly, plus tons of bonus content like outlines and deleted scenes. It's really the best way to support what I do. Thanks for watching.