Habit Building Is The Key To Writing Success
A few weeks back, I started my mailing list.
The first few emails I sent to my subscribers were about the power of building habits.
I consider habit building to be the biggest determinant of your success as a writer. In this article, I’ll explain why.
Why Is Habit Building So Crucial To Writing Success?
I like writing as a career and business endeavour. The reason I like writing as a business is because when you get down to the nitty-gritty, there are very few variables to consider.
A lawyer has to deal with clients, legal statutes, a huge amount of research and the fact that every job is unique.
A sportsperson has to deal with physical fitness which comes, goes and is achieved by tons of factors; many outside of their control.
Your average office worker might have a relatively straightforward button-pushing job, but they still have to deal with the corporate machine and social who-gets-the-coffee and who-hits-the-target issues.
Writing is simple in comparison. You sit at a computer and write. Providing you can do that, you’re probably going to succeed in some capacity.
Knowing what to write is a bit of a pain, but it’s a single variable that you can test. If you start as a freelancer, your clients do that stage for you. Either way, your success is determined by the amount of time you spend at the computer typing.
That’s why habit building is an important skill for a writer.
Why Habit Building Is Your One-Goal As a Beginner Writer
Many, many would-be writers fail to ever write a book. Some of them don’t even write the first paragraph.
Millions of people think, “I have a novel in me” but never act on it. The reasons why those people don’t just simply sit at a computer and type are numerous and range from, “I don’t know how to start,” to “How do I get published?” and all of those reasons are stupid.
Without sitting and writing, you aren’t a writer.
Forget being good.
Don’t worry about carving a legacy.
Assume you’re not going to be stacking gold coins in the near future.
Until you get into the habit of sitting and writing those questions will have absolutely zero-effect on anything you do.
I read somewhere that the average “professional writer” writes 500 words in a day. This is ludicrous. If you’ve never written anything before, then aim for 500 words a day. It’s a great goal for a beginner. That’s ridiculous if you’re a professional though.
It all adds up to the fact that most writers need to sit and write more, and that’s the key factor determining their success.
I’ve written about writing quickly before… but you don’t have to write quickly to achieve a huge amount.
Once you get into practice of writing regularly, you can write 1000 words in an hour. That’s slow and achievable by anyone. My Dad only types with his two index fingers and I’m pretty sure he could hit 1000 words an hour.
Then, a couple of hours a day means you’ve got 2000 words a day going into your “bank of words.”
Time = Words = Success
Let’s go back to the counterargument I made a while back. “But what if you write about the wrong thing?”
At some point, you’re going to write about the wrong thing. Either you’re working for a client and you have to do the whole thing over because they hate it, or you hate your novel or you write a blog that doesn’t turn into a success for whatever reason.
Those sorts of setbacks are annoying but inevitable.
Time in the chair typing is still going to be the biggest predictor of your success.
If someone writes 500 words a day, it will take them one hundred days to create a 50,000 word novel. If that novel flops, there’s three months down the toilet.
If someone writes 5,000 words a day (easily achievable regardless of project) then a flopped novel only takes ten days out of their life.
Or, in other mathematical simulations, in the time it takes Author 1 to write a potentially-failing novel, Author 2 has ten attempts to get one that sticks. That’s the benefit of thinking like a pulp fiction author.
Regardless of how quickly you want to work or how many failures you have, building the habit of sitting and writing is the most important thing you can do. Especially as a young or otherwise inexperienced writer. You’ll get more failures when you’re learning the ropes. Get through them quickly.
How I Established Writing Every Day As A Habit
When I first thought, “Why not be a writer?” I set myself a crazy challenge: I’d try and write 10,000 words every day and see how many words I could get in a month.
Out of the 270,000 words I wrote in that month, I didn’t publish any of them. That wasn’t the point. The point was to get into the habit of writing a lot.
You can do the above step or leave it out… depending on how busy your life is.
Here’s a better exercise I did for the better part of eighteen months though:
I simply kept a spreadsheet of every word I wrote every day.
Some days I’d write 400 words. Some days I’d write 8,000 words. At the end of every month I’d create a little graph with Excel.
(Side note: If you’re a blogger, then the Routine Writing plugin does this for all your posts. Check it out.)
I’ve found that just measuring something tends to make it more likely to happen. If you measure your weight loss, you’ll find you’re more likely to lose weight. When you measure how much you write, you’ll write more.
Build the amount of words you write every day, and then worry about other stuff.
Final Thoughts
As a beginner writer, you’ll have hundreds of questions – possibly more. You’ll worry about what to write, who to write for and what to do once you’ve written something.
Forget about all of those things for now.
Instead, make it a goal to write 500 words a day (if you write nothing.) Scale it up with free pockets of time until you’re writing several thousand a day. (This is easier than you think.)
When you’re writing several thousand words a day, start hitting the publish button – whether you’re creating short stories, blog posts or bigger projects. You’ll see what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll have the volume needed to accurately determine that.
You can’t write two blog posts a month and then say, “This isn’t going to work!” There’s not enough data. If you write two blog posts a day for a month and publish them all and get zero visitors, then you’ll be able to make a better guess.
Get to the point where you have a lot of words and then you can make decisions and question yourself.