Building The Discipline to Write Every Day

Table of Contents

• Writing Everyday On My Own
• What Counts As Writing Practice?
• Different Kinds of Writing
• Tips to Build Writing Discipline

           

  Writers must write to write. That is the most simple way of saying that writers need to write (practice writing) in order to be better writers. And not just write some of the time, but daily or as close to daily as you can get. I can’t tell you how frequently you need to practice writing but I can share with you what I’ve learned about this and how I apply this principle on my journey as a writer.

              For practice and progression, I like to think of writing as a muscle. Just like any hobby, job, skill, or any other thing I do, like a muscle I have to work it out so that it can get stronger and my work can get better: Writing every day strengthens my writing skills. But do I actually write every day? 

              I try to write every day and have been successful so far. And naturally, there are still a few days that I slip up; Getting to this point took some building. But building the discipline to write every day wasn’t easy. Starting out I wrote whenever I got the inspiration, then I tried to write every week and then every few days until I wrote every day. And if I got off track I just continued from where I left off and kept writing.

              My discipline got a major boost from a creative writing class I took during my second year in college. This class required me to write creative work every few days to hand in assignments. But after that class was over and I continued to build discipline. Along the way, I struggled with coming up with content to practice with. What do I write about when I practice? should I work on my pieces? Should I try different writing exercises? Writing for class I already had prompts and what not given by the teacher, so practicing I had to come up with prompts topics of my own. 

              Initially, I tried practicing only my pieces or only exercises. Then I tried prompts online but I didn’t like most of the prompts I found and ran into a bunch of challenges: there were many writing aspects that I wasn’t targeting. So after some more exploration with different methods and with some research, I found that a sentence, a paragraph, my pieces, a poem, a page, a note, or 100 words all count as exercise. There are so many ways to exercise writing that will cater to my needs. So I considered my needs and goals and picked exercises from there.

I need to produce writing pieces, but I would also like to be a better writer and improve in dialogue,  getting to the point and etc.. I also need to write these blog posts. 

              So every day I write and some days I read. When writing I often write in different forms.  Writing in different forms helps me to diversify what I am working on and allows me to exclusively work on my goals. It also helps me with writer’s block and allows me to target specific aspects of my writing.

For example, an essay may help me be more direct, a poem teaches me how to use images and be cohesive with themes and messages. A paragraph of dialogue or paragraph of free writing helps me to get my ideas out of my head and onto the page.

Blog articles help me with consistency (to write the same type of writing for a long time), and a page of a story or a page explaining what happened today helps me organize my ideas, and plots, sequence events effectively, and so on. I don’t go trying out all forms of writing but mainly the ones that I am familiar with and know will help my writing. 

Besides working on my pieces, I write essays, poems, short stories, sentences, blog articles, paragraphs, and notes.

              My days generally consist of me working on a writing piece and then also practicing writing techniques, skills and concepts with one of the forms I mentioned. And writing or adding onto a blog post.

              Outside of this and once in a while, I also may do writing exercises I see online or use writing prompts from other sites and blogs. To step out of my comfort zone. 

             This is how I have been keeping up my writing discipline. I may not use this method forever, but for now, it works and I’m progressing in my writing with it.

              The point is as a writer I realized that in order to get work done and be a better writer I need to write every day. And to write every day I needed discipline.

So I… 

1. Developed discipline gradually: starting to write whenever I could –> writing every week–> writing every few days–> writing every day.
2. Practice according to my needs and goals for writing
3. Alternate writing forms during practice to liven it up and target specific writing techniques and aspects that will improve my writing
4. And I don’t beat myself up if I miss a day or two.