6 Simple Tricks for Building a Strong Writing Habit [Part 2]

Do you ever feel like your writing life would be so much easier if only you could stay inspired?

Maybe you had an initial burst of enthusiasm for the project you’re working on, but it quickly faded and now you’re struggling.


So how exactly do you form a writing habit?

Here are six easy tricks to try right now. You don’t need to sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, and you don’t need superhuman levels of willpower.
#4: Mark Your Calendar
One very simple habit-forming tool is your calendar. Not just to plan ahead for writing time, but for tracking what you’ve done.

Put a check mark, an X, or even a smiley face sticker or shiny gold star on each day that you write. (I like to do this with a physical calendar, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use a virtual one instead.)

Many writers find it helps to build a “chain” of successes, where they’ve written every day, or every target day, if they’re not writing on a daily basis.

You could also look for a sense of progress: perhaps in the first week of marking your calendar, you only write on one day, but by the end of a couple of months, you’re consistently writing three days a week and sometimes managing five.

Accountability can come into play here too, if you make your calendar visible to other people – hang it on the wall in your kitchen, stick it on the fridge, or if it’s the virtual sort of calendar, share it with writer friends online.

#5: Get Over the Getting Started Hurdle
What’s the toughest bit of a writing session for you? For me (and I think for an awful lot of writers), it’s the getting started bit.

You may well find that once you actually sit down, put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, make a plan and get a few sentences into your work-in-progress, the writing flows pretty easily.

But getting going can be tough. I know writers who find themselves engaging in all sorts of displacement activities – even tackling the chores – rather than writing.

If getting started is a big hurdle for you, make it easier. Come up with a simple, consistent routine that you can use at the start of each writing session. It might only take a minute or two.

For instance:

Put on a particular album, track, or playlist that you like to use when you write—music can be a great cue to get into the writing zone. If you’re not keen on writing with music playing, try Noisli.
Open up your work-in-progress document. (For some people, just opening the document is enough to break through resistance.)
Write down what you want to accomplish during your writing session. This gets you focused and gets you writing!
Start your timer.
Once you’ve done the three or four little steps of your routine, you may find that you hardly notice yourself starting to write.

#6: Share Your Work with Other Writers
In my own writing life, there’s nothing that’s helped me more than having a circle of writer friends to share work-in-progress with.

Setting my own deadlines for finishing a scene or chapter leaves far too much room for renegotiation: committing to a weekly or monthly meeting means I have to meet an external deadline, one that involves other people who’re counting on me to get my work done.

You don’t have to join a writers’ group, though. Sharing your work could also mean:

Posting regularly (e.g. once a week) on your blog.
Asking a spouse or friend to read what you’ve written each week.
Paying for an editor to review your manuscript.
Publishing excerpts from your novel-in-progress online, perhaps on a writing-related forum.
Emailing each session’s work to a writing buddy.
It could even be as simple as sharing your day’s or week’s word count with your friends on Facebook, rather than sharing your actual writing.



If you’ve already established a strong writing habit in your life, I’d love to hear what’s worked well for you – do you have an extra trick to add to my list?

And if you’re still working on that writing habit, drop a comment below to say which tip you’ll be trying out this week.

Ali Luke