The best way to create a consistent writing habit is to be a freelancer in need of money.
But that's not the answer you're looking for, I know.
In September 2023, Substack published a three-part series on how to create a consistent writing habit. They broke it down into:
Set goals for your publication. (Why)
Formats, style, and templates. (What)
Setting your schedule and building the habit. (When)
It was about understanding why, what, and when you're publishing.
There were ideas, both in the post and comments, that I'd consider a typical, solid, common response. Write down your goal, work towards the goal, expect the goal, plan for the success of the goal, various time management techniques, notebooks by the bed, research tricks, reading lists and books...and of course, the less tangible things that Instagram well, such as "be a risk taker" or "be more organized."
All good, useful things, I suppose, but if you're like me, you've heard the same thing so much that it rolls off your back and crashes behind you with some level of distraction. I am always hoping for something new, in search of that one secret tip that really will change everything. In the comments of that Substack series, the most angst was less about tools and systems and more about habit creation, and I think that's where this all falls.
So the question remains: how do you create a consistent writing habit?
How do you do it when:
you don't feel inspired
you don't feel like writing
you're discouraged by traffic, sales, or appropriate response to your writing
you feel overwhelmed with other work
you feel overwhelmed by the amount of other writers and creators out there
no one seems to be reading
you don't seem to have any audience
you're motivated by results but you're not actually seeing any yet
you're working hard on the assumption that someday it'll pay off but you are starting to doubt it
you're not sure your words are making a difference in the world
William Zinsser, while acknowledging that On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is basically him writing a book of writing tips (and a very good one at that which you should read without question) said in a later essay entitled "Tips" that he doesn't like the idea of "writing tips."
"Tips can make someone a better writer but not necessarily a good writer," he explains.
Now, if you do a search on "william zinsser writing tips" you'll find plenty of articles full of tips attributed to him, or pulled from his work. I'd recommend getting a copy of his book The Writer Who Stayed, a collection of his columns, one of which is the article "Tips", and read his own words directly instead. That's not a tip, that's a suggestion.
But back to the question at hand, about developing a writing habit. Zinsser's opening salvo in his famous On Writing Well has him describing a scene in which he is on a two-person panel at a writing event, contradicting himself with another writer who makes the process sound painless and all about waiting for the feeling to write to overtake you. Not only is Zinsser hilarious, but he makes the excellent point that he approached writing less as art and more as craft. And craft is something that can be learned and practiced, not inherited.
So, then, how does one develop a writing habit and practice the craft of writing?
A consistent writing habit starts early.
I'm glad I started blogging back in 1999 and 2000, when it was new and there were few bloggers and I could get my bungled writing out of the way without too much concern about cancel culture and old words haunting you decades later. I'm also glad that the readership was different and there was no social media or influencer culture to turn blogging into something weird. It was truly like writing an online journal of anything that was interesting to you. Platforms, branding, and all the other stuff we see now were not common. People simply made a list (blogroll) of favorites and every day would click specifically to their favorite blogs to see what was new in their corner of the world. They'd share interesting posts on their blogs and the circular traffic turned into a fun discovery process. The biggest metric was simple traffic (i.e. hits) and we'd put hit counters on all our pages and glory when they were in the five and six digits after years of work, indifferent to how the person got to the website or what they did when they arrived.
It was so much fun.
But we're living and writing in the right now, not the back then. The roots of my writing were planted in a different soil which makes my answer less useful to someone just starting now.
My journey in online writing, at least, can't exactly be replicated today.
So I don't know if I'm the one to be the best to answer this question of creating a consistent blogging habit because I created my recipe for writing in a different kind of kitchen and the recipe was less fussy. I wrote long posts and short micro-blogging Twitter-esque posts and some days nothing and some days five posts and sometimes about personal things and sometimes about broad cultural topics and it was all perfectly fine and eventually I found a rhythm and a flow and a way to work and regular readers.
Start now, not tomorrow, even if you've missed the glory days. Do it somewhere, even if it isn't online.
Write in a place you're most likely to continue writing.
We have a lot of places we can write today, and nearly all of them with the potential of an audience. Blogs. Social media. Journals. Newspapers desperate for local content. Digital magazines. Email newsletters. Forums. Diaries. Books.
Each place has its own kind of "carrot" that prompts a person to continue the work. Some of it is public accolade, or proof that someone is reading what you write (e.g. traffic, subscribers, comments). Some of it is more tangible, such as filling up shelves with diaries or self-publishing a book.
These are not neutral platforms; your personality and what motivates you will have an impact on where you most naturally form a writing habit.
The carrot for me, back in the early blogging days, was the small pocket of regular readers I'd carved out and that each blog post instigated interesting interaction. I don't know what the carrot is for today, as the interactions instigated by publishing anything online nearly always involve some troll and that's less a carrot and more just a beating stick. The casino-esque rewards of today's likes and followers may work, but it also may cause you to self-censor. You will have to be honest with yourself about your motivation for writing. Is it to improve your craft or just feel that people like you and you matter?
If I was just starting now, with the online realm as ridiculous as its become, I'm not sure if I'd keep writing because I would probably self-edit my work to protect it from cancel culture, platform removal, and raging social media comments sections where my posts might be shared. Because of that, I'd never really learn to find my voice and writing style. I'd be bloating everything with caveats, trigger warnings, and the strange brutalization of the language that is becoming common in today's culture (e.g. people aren't killed, they are "unalived").
Where you write, and the carrot that comes with it to reward the exercise, matters.
Asking how to create a consistent writing habit seems like a strange question.
During an interview with a newspaper reporter, regarding a book I'd written on the pandemic, I was asked a question I found confusing.
"Why is liberty so important to you?" she asked.
I had difficulty answering the question because I didn't understand why anyone would even ask it.
After over two decades of blogging and writing, asking me how to create a writing habit is confusing. I don't understand why the question is being asked, perhaps because the habit has been so ingrained it's not really a habit but almost like an autonomic function. Even when I have tried to stop writing, I still find myself writing and blogging. I have been writing for more years of my life than I haven't, most of it online.
But let me try to understand that question.
If you love to write, is it difficult to keep writing?
Sometimes. There are times of discouragement, impostor syndrome, and lack of ideas. Just look at that list above about when it's hard to write. The question then is how to write when it isn't easy, not how to create a writing habit.
Even when I'm struggling to write, I feel the need to write. It's almost painful.
But if not writing is easier than writing, I guess my very first question: is why do you want to write? Do you feel as if your head would explode if you didn’t write? Or is it just an avenue to revenue or something else, like building a reputation and a side-product for passive income?
Neither are wrong, but the latter will make it more of a battle of will to make writing a habit.
Whatever the case, I would definitely read William Zinsser's book On Writing Well.
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