As a writer, I’ve found myself drifting away from my craft on a sea of procrastination on a few occasions. One day you’re all fired up and the keyboard is smoking and the next, life takes over and suddenly you can’t seem to get back into the habit of writing. How did I fix this?
I did what some of the most renowned authors in the world do: I made time to write. If you’ve ever wondered how writers like Stephen King manage to publish a book almost every year, it’s all about creating writing routines.
Create a Writing Routine
How is it that you get yourself to brush your teeth and shower every day? It’s very simply because you’ve made it part of your routine. You have woken up, brushed your teeth, and showered so many times in your life that it’s become a habit. Now imagine you could sit down and write with as much ease.
Choose a Writing Space
Just like when you go into the bathroom, your brain knows it’s going to be brushing teeth or shower, you need a space in your home that your brain connects with writing. Ideally, you’ll want this to be a place with few distractions so that you can maximize your time there.
The ideal writing space could include some of the following:
| Aspect of the space | Check? |
| It’s relatively private | |
| There isn’t much foot traffic | |
| A comfortable chair | |
| Multiple screens if possible—one for research, one for writing | |
| Space to stretch if you plan on writing for long periods | |
| No clutter | |
| Display inspirational pictures (later in this article we discuss visualizing your writing goals, this would be the perfect place for those images) |
Set A Writing Time
Depending on your daily routine, figure out a time of the day that you will have enough brain power to write and also when your distractions will be minimized. For some people this will be super early in the morning, for others, it might be just before they go to bed.
Although we are all different, studies into when we tend to be the most creative have shown that mornings are usually creative gold for writers. This is the period of the day during which our prefrontal cortex is most active and that’s the part of our brains where the magic happens.
Set a Word Goal
How does a 150,000 word book get written? 200 to 500 words at a time. In creating a writing routine, it is recommended to include a minimum word goal. Be realistic and set yourself a goal you know you can achieve. For some, a minimum of 500 words is doable. I recommend you start at 200 words and work your way up.
One you’ve decided on your writing space, time, and word goal, create a mantra for yourself: “I sit down in this chair at 06:30 am and I do not move away from this place until I have written 200 words.”
Cementing Writing Habits
Setting up a routine that you repeat daily is just one part of getting into the habit of writing. The other side of the coin is staying committed to that routine. Whether you are a published author or a new writer, there are a few ways that you can solidify daily writing habits.
Work Those Labels
Often, our behavior will emulate what we call ourselves. For a long time I believed that I couldn’t call myself a writer if my writing wasn’t being published and read. It didn’t take long for me to throw that idea out of the window.
Start calling yourself a writer even if it is not your full time job. The more you tell your brain that you are a writer, the more likely you will be to carry out the types of behaviors writers carry out, i.e. writing!
Ideally, you want to be saying this out loud and even to other people, but beware that you will get the inevitable question: “Oh! What have you written?” As long as you have come to the understanding that you don’t have to be published to be a writer, you can answer this with ease.
Surround Yourself With Writers
Although writing can be one of the most solitary of endeavours, it definitely helps to be part of a community that supports the craft. Join a writing circle or club, whether online or in-person. You will not only be inspired by the success of others, but you will also find yourself wanting to write more as you see others doing the same.
Carry A Notebook
You never know when inspiration is going to strike. One of my book ideas, for instance, came to me while I was waiting in a supermarket check-out line. If I didn’t have my trusty notebook with me, that idea may have been lost forever. Of course, if you’re more digitally inclined, you can use one of the many note-taking applications available to writers today.
If you have artistic flairs outside of writing—perhaps you paint, draw, or scrapbook—you can supersize the creative meaning that your writing notebook holds by customizing the cover. One option is to create a scene on the cover that resonates with how you will feel when you have reached your writing goals.
Three Things You Have to Stop Doing Write (Right) Now!
Learning all about tips and tricks to create writing habits is great, but it is also important to understand what is dragging you down. There are a few things that I needed to stop doing in order to make writing a habit.
Wishing You Had Time to Write
Here, you are going to need to be really honest with yourself. You do have time to write and by constantly claiming that you don’t, you’re just convincing yourself of something that isn’t true.
Do you have ten minutes to spare in your day? Then, you have time to write.
If you really think you don’t have time to write then take a few days and do a time audit on your daily activities. Using a notebook, record exactly what you do and how long it takes you. I can guarantee you that there is going to be a few of the following:
- “Scrolled through Facebook = Five minutes”
- “Watched a bad sitcom = Thirty minutes”
- “Went down a rabbit hole on YouTube and ended up watching videos about dancing llamas = Thirty-five minutes”
If you have seventy minutes in your day to do mind-numbing activities that don’t provide you with any personal benefit, could you use fifteen of those minutes to write?
If you are looking to set aside extra time to write, streamlining the other activities in your life can help you to do that. Here are five ways you can stop wasting time:
- Stop constantly checking your email. Better yet, take your email off your phone and only access it through your computer. Then, set three times during the day (morning, midday, and late afternoon) when you check your mail and reply to it.
- Automate your social media accounts. As with your email, schedule time during the day when you can catch up on social media. You can also use tools like Cold Turkey and Hootsuite to automate your socials.
- Stop making enormous to-do lists. These might make you feel busy, but they do nothing to aid your productivity. Your to-do list for each day should consist of no more than five items: three high priority and two medium priority.
- Stop pretending to multitask. Although you think you are great at it, you are actually wasting time. By not paying full attention to a single task you are actually spending more time on it than you would if you just focused.
- Stop saying yes to everyone. This one is hard, especially if you are a people-pleaser like me, but imagine how much time you could save if you didn’t go to your cousin’s boring barbeque and instead, stayed home to write.
Stop Writing Things That Don’t Matter
Writing prompts are great and they can help you to keep your creative juices flowing, but if you are spending your allocated writing time every day creating random pieces with no purpose, you’re just spinning your wheels.
Use your writing time to work on a project. It could be a book, a short story, or an article, but don’t waste that precious time.
With that said, even I get to a point in a project where I feel like I need to do something else in order to really get back into the project again. That’s fine. If you’re using one or two of your writing sessions per week just to free write and keep those words coming, there’s no problem with that.
Ideally, though, you want to use at least five sessions a week to work on a project that is going to serve your writing goals.
Stop The Negative Self-Talk
Just like telling yourself that you are a writer on an ongoing basis helps you to feel and act like a writer, negative self-talk can have your writing progress stalling pretty quickly.
If you’ve written 200 words and you read it over and it’s really not the best thing you’ve ever written, don’t be too hard on yourself. Even the greatest writers don’t consistently put out amazing prose. That’s what rewrites are for.
Turn negative self-talk into positive reinforcement:
- “I am such a bad writer,” becomes, “I am learning and growing with every line I write. Tomorrow will be better.”
- “I can’t come up with anything original,” becomes, “I’m working through ideas and the best one is just around the corner.”
- “I’m never going to be the next Charles Dickens,” becomes, “I don’t need to be the next Charles Dickens. I am the first me!”
Positive affirmations work well to help you start seeing yourself the way you want to. Here are five affirmations that you can use, as a writer, to boost your creative spirit:
- “I am a writer. Writing is my art.”
- “Rejection is an important part of the process of growth.”
- “I can be a successful writer as well as a good mother/friend/wife/sister.”
- “I am responsible for my own success as a writer.”
- “I can visualize my writing success and I have the tenacity and endurance to achieve it.”
Use Tech to Keep you Writing
While technology can be a distraction from your writing if you allow it to be, it can also be a powerful ally in sticking to your writing goals and creating effective writing habits.
I’ve been through quite a few productivity apps in my journey to find one that really makes a difference to my writing and here are the top five apps I recommend:
- Coach.Me is an app that can be used on various platforms and incorporates community encouragement and virtual coaching to help you build new writing habits. What makes this app stand out from the rest is that it has a specialized writing journey to maximize motivation and help you to kickstart your writing routine.
- Trello is a web-based productivity app and if you are old-school like me and remember working with index cards and cork boards, you’re going to feel right at home in Trello. The app helps you organize your writing projects so that you know exactly what you need to work on when you sit down for your daily writing session.
- Writeometer is a phone-based app that allows you to create a project, set your deadline, and then calculates how many words you need to write each day in order to attain that goal. It also gives you reminders if you haven’t recorded your word count for that day.
- Calmly Writer is a web-based writing platform that helps you minimize distractions and maximize the time you have allocated to writing.
- Evernote helps to keep all of your research in one place. There’s nothing more distracting than sitting down to write only to realize that you need information that is somewhere else. With Evernote, everything is one place and there’s no temptation to head down the internet rabbit hole.
Let’s be honest, though. You can have all the fancy apps in the world, but if you don’t have the drive to sit down and write, no app is going to force you to do that. Building a writing routine is as much about keeping your motivation up as it is about forming habits.
The long stretch of writing a book can be a motivation-sapping exercise if you don’t actively keep up your inspiration levels. One tool that I find really helpful in maintaining my levels of motivation around a wide variety of goals, is visualization.
Visualize The End Goal
Visualization is a powerful way to keep yourself aligned with your goals and writing is no different. Probably one of the most important visual concepts in writing is a book cover.
Head over to Canva and design a simple book cover that represents the vision you have for your book. Put your name on the front as boldly as you like. Close your eyes and imagine what it’s going to feel like when your book is in print and your name is on the cover.
Every time you feel your motivation ebbing away, take out that book cover print and experience the emotions you connected with it. Understand that if you stop now, that book cover will never be a reality, so sit down and start writing!
You can also draw up your own raving five star review of your book and use that as a visualization tool. Any physical embodiment of the completion of your writing goals will work.
How to Get in the Habit of Writing—Wrapped!
As with anything in life, building positive habits is vital to achieving goals and creating success in our chosen fields. To achieve the writing success you want, you simply have to get those words on paper.
In this article, we’ve covered several tips and tricks to creating a writing routine including selecting the right space, time, and setting word count goals for yourself. There are innumerable productivity tools out there, some of which we’ve discussed here, but your greatest tool as a writer is between your ears.
You and your tenacity are the key to building writing habits that stick. If you stumble, join the club, we all do. Just make sure you dust off that keyboard and keep pushing to the finish line!
Read about the benefits of writing daily in another of our helpful articles: Ways You Can Improve Yourself: The Benefits of Writing Daily.