Want to Write Daily? Uncover the Secret of Flexibility

What’s the secret to writing every day — and successfully maintaining it?

I’d never committed to a daily practise before, which made it a tricky goal to keep. My original attempts were very much stop-start actions until March, when I re-started for the 4th or 5th time; and somehow, I reached 10 days. That was enough for me to keep going. The thought of losing 10 links in my chain was too much.

I continued until I finished my novel — 90 days in. I wanted to keep going, because in our culture, 100 is a big number. But I’d finished it, and adding more random words would not improve the quality of writing; which was my ultimate goal.

I took some time off, and then re-started with a goal of editing. Realising I can’t write 500 words a day, every day for the rest of my life; I set myself a more realistic goal.

So far, I’m up to 70-odd days on the new chain, having created a mixture of editing and writing goals. This works better for me, as switching goals from writing to editing, yet continuing to ‘count’ from 90, would feel like cheating in my head if I hadn’t designed it this way from the beginning.

If you know what your projects will be throughout the year, this is a great way to create a flexible goal that suits your writing. My key processes include “idea brewing/planning”, “drafting a first draft” and “in edits” after some down-time. Thus, you can make a goal that gives you an “and/or” like this:

That’s 20,000 words a year edited or the remaining 50,000-odd words (from when I changed my goal) that I needed to meet my external goal of 150k words written this year. You can pick whatever numbers suit you…

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