This fact is undeniable: creating a daily practice requires commitment. If you’re the type of person that feels safe and secure within the confines of commitment, awesome. You’ve got a leg up. If you’re like me—someone who often feels that commitment is like, oh, a death grip squeezing the life out of poor, sorry freedom—then you’ve got some extra work to do. For folks like us, I include these tips. You may have heard some of them before, but that’s only because they always bear repeating.
• Create two goals—a reasonable minimum goal and an ideal goal for your daily and/or weekly writing. Perhaps your minimum goal is 1 hour of writing per week, but your ideal goal is 2 hours. Aim for the 2 hours, but if you fall short you’ve most likely reached your minimum. The idea is to strive for your ideal but know that achieving your minimum is a worthy accomplishment too.
• Set an umbrella goal based on a predetermined number of days, such as ten days of writing in a row. Umbrella goals provide a container that gives you structure and helps you to move forward. Telling yourself to “write every day” can often be a setup for failure since it’s such a large, open-ended goal. I recommend choosing an umbrella goal that feels like a little bit of a stretch, then—when you achieve that goal—set a slightly more ambitious one.
• Find ways to hold yourself accountable to the work. I can’t sing the praises of outside accountability enough. You might post daily progress to followers on a social media site, or, perhaps, read your favorite sentence of the day to your partner, child, or friend every evening. Build accountability into your writing practice and you’ll be far more likely to stick with it.
• Track your progress with a visual calendar, whether it’s on your phone or physically pinned to the fridge. Mark off the days that you write. Seeing what you’ve accomplished along the way helps motivate you to continue.
• Try devotion instead of discipline. Discipline is often associated with the concept of punishment; devotion is more often used in connection with love. Cultivate devotion in your creative work and you’ll be focused on the love of daily practice, not the pain of it.
• Let the writing wander. Follow where it leads you. Release the idea that you’re doing anything wrong by straying from your original intent. Trust that the writing has its own wisdom.
• Keep the inner editor at bay while you’re using the prompts. Unless there is a horribly misspelled word that might baffle you later, there’s no need to revise the text as you go. Even punctuation and grammar can wait.