The Secret to a Consistent Daily Writing Practice

If there’s one thing that’s always mentioned when it comes to writing, it’s how important it is to have a daily writing practice.   

I remember seeing articles and blog posts about popular writer’s routines and how many of them had a target word count they’d hit every day.  

Stephen King’s was 2,000 words. Earnest Hemingway was 500. Margaret Atwood’s was between 1,000 to 2,000. And the list goes on.  

The concept of having a daily writing practice always made sense to me, but I struggled to make it happen for myself.   

Why? Because I was obsessing over the content of what I would write each day.  

I wasn’t always working on an active project, and I'm not a fan of randomly jumping into a story without planning.   

So, how is a person like me supposed to write 500 or 5000 words daily if I don’t even know what I'm writing about?  

This plagued me for a long time until I came across a post on Pinterest that made everything clear to me. It was a quote from Terry Pratchett that said “The first draft is just telling yourself the story.”   

I took that to mean that the priority is getting the words down, no matter what it looks like. Then, I realized I had been overthinking about what my daily writing needed to be.  

When I sat down to write, I didn’t need to write polished, finalized prose that was ready to be published. I just needed to write anything down that made sense to me.   

It wasn’t the content that mattered but the act of writing itself that was important.  

When we’re cultivating a daily habit, one of the first things you’re teaching yourself is how to show up for your work. That meant coming to my desk each day and writing a certain number of words, regardless of what those words were.  

Yes, there will be days when I have a story in progress, and I can write scenes or character sketches.   

But there will also be days when I show up and write about ideas I would like to write one day, something I noticed while walking down the street, or even a weird dream I had the night before.  

Hell, I could even write my grocery list, and guess what? That’s still writing!  

It was freeing for me when I realized that I didn’t need to focus on the content during those sessions because it allowed me to be more creative.   

When I stopped worrying about every word I put down or if the punctuation was okay, I began to write more than ever.   

One day, I even wrote over 10,000 words, and it was great. Sure, it was filled with typos and missing punctuation, but the words and the story were there.  

My writing improved when I started treating my daily writing sessions as a conversation with myself.   

It's like being on a Facetime call with a friend. You don’t have to be too precious with what you’re saying as long as the main points are there. You can always go back and fix it later if you need to.  

And the best part? No one will ever see it but you.  

You don’t have to post this on social media or send it to an agent. Your daily writing is for you to learn how to show up for yourself every day and get the words on the page.  

Remember, it’s not about the writing content. It’s about the act of writing itself.