Make Writing a Habit

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At the start of the year I wrote that I planned to write 3 novels in 2015, a rather ambitious goal considering two things: 1) The longest story I have written to date came out to a short novel, not a full-length novel and 2) I fit my writing into and around the cracks of my life (for instance I’m writing this blog post in the car while my wife drives us to work). How do I plan to accomplish writing 3 full-length novels then? By making writing a habit.

I’m not a morning a person, never will be. Given an uninterrupted stretch of days, my schedule will shift to staying up late and sleeping in. But early morning (and I mean early—before the kids wake up) is the only consistent time I’ve been able to find to write. I’ve been fortunate enough to make this a habit, so much so that I give it little thought when I’m not writing a blog post on it.

By consistently getting to the keyboard, bleary-eyed and grumbling, day-in and day-out, I managed to crank out 22k words in January, and that included time spent on content editing the first part of the novel and a coarse polishing pass. Some of those sessions were awesome (3k!) others were abysmal (100 words) but by having a regular habit progress was made every day and I’m on pace to hit my target of 3 novels (3 novels at 80k each is 240k words for the year, or 20k a month).

Little bits add up in a big way. And if you’re a writer, for a fun way to track those little bits check out my last blog post that referenced the 2015 Word Tracker.

I’m off to accumulate more words.

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