On Writing Every Day
After writing about habit formation yesterday, and at the beginning of a month of blogging every day, I got a relevant blog link in my email yesterday. (I have a huge number of blogs in my RSS Feed reader, if I subscribe via email, I am less likely to miss a post.)
According to Joe Bunting over at The Write Practice, the secret to writing on your blog every day is…
Writing.
Every.
Day.
And, when I think about it, there’s more truth in that apparent tautology than first appears. When you write something for your blog every day, you are building the mental habits of collecting ideas for your blog and shaping them into appropriate form every day.
I notice that happening with me already, after only a few days. Yesterday, after reading The Write Practice, my mind started assembling this post, connecting what I had read to what I had written yesterday, and making further connections that over-complicated this post and have been deleted. This morning, after my soul writing, I turned on my computer and was highly tempted to fall into my “waste time on the Internet” habits, but my mind rebelled. “Write your blog post now!” my internal voices said to me, and my body responded and I wrote this.
I have contemplated writing some posts in advance this month, something I don’t usually do. But, I am not sure I want to. Because of that habit thing.
Having had a not-writing habit for so many years has made it hard for me to build a writing habit. To build that habit, I need to maintain the discipline of writing every day more strenuously than if I had never had a not-writing habit. Writing every day without exception is the speediest way to build the writing habit. In addition, writing for an audience every day, as opposed to journaling, hones the skills related to considering audience.
I may not continue blogging every day after this exercise, but I have good reason to continue writing something intended for an audience daily. I need a strong writing habit so I can slide off it once in a while without stopping writing completely. But, before I can reach that point, I must be diligent in establishing the right habits, the right subconscious brain activity.
Posted on March 4, 2012, in Blogging, Creativity, Daily Life, This Writing Life and tagged daily, discipline, habit formation, writing. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
Kate Arms-Roberts 
Hi Kate,
I would never suggest that one blog every day, although I also read Joe’s post and thought it provided real value. There is no question, though, that developing the habit of writing every day is critical for developing mental muscle memory. For me, anyway, I rarely suffer writer’s block because my inner critic knows I’ll write anyway.
Patrick
Blogging every day makes sense if your primary goal is blogging. In my life, blogging every day for this space takes time that I would prefer to be spending on my fiction or splitting between blogs.
I think my ideal daily writing schedule would include some fiction, some non-fiction, and some soul writing or other personal writing. Without regularly working on both, the jump between fiction and non-fiction is really hard for me to manage.
Cheers,
Kate
I just like the challenge. Having attempted this several times, even though I have yet to finish successfully, it builds up my tolerance –getting used to writing frequently for a larger audience (or at least the hope of a larger audience.)
Maybe you’ll make it this year.
I like these challenges, too. Though I am usually trying to find some way to twist the challenge into some bigger purpose so I don’t lose momentum just because the challenge is over.
Kate
Hi Kate–your ideal daily writing schedule sounds like mine, although I seldom manage to get to all three of those. I like the idea of committing to writing daily, although I’m not sure I would want to blog daily :). People might get sick of me!
I quite like the idea of blogging daily in the long run, as long as it is for different blogs. I’m not sure how I’ll feel at the end of this one-month challenge.
Cheers,
Kate