How to Establish Your Writing Practice
The term “writing practice” is a pretty generalized description of a system that a writer might follow on a regular basis for productivity purposes. Not all writers have a consistent practice, but those who do seem to swear by them. In fact, they are so convinced their writing practice is what led them to success, that they share their tips and tricks with other writers.
All in all, it isn’t a terrible thing to find inspiration through another writer’s practice. However, because not all writers bring the same skills, knowledge, lifestyle, and habits to the same table, one writer’s practice ever rarely suits another writer completely.
In this blog post, I break down the aspects you need to consider and evaluate so that you can establish the writing practice that works best for you.
Let’s hop to it!
WHY DO YOU NEED A WRITING PRACTICE?
A writing practice is the foundation of our entire creative system. A practice helps us to manage our routines, habits, schedules. It helps us to measure our productivity and creative output. It keeps us accountable and forward-thinking. A writing practice enables us to determine when our creative well is brimming over and when it needs replenishing. A practice will also help keep us from leaning into limiting beliefs that don’t serve us, and encourage us instead to operate from a place of empowerment.
THE KEY TO PERSONAL WRITING SUCCESS
A writing practice is one of the keys to reaching our goals and living our dreams. When we do the work to construct a foundation of strategies that play to our personal strengths, we’re more likely to find writing success.
Success is a result of these factors:
Showing Up
Taking Action
Failing and Pivoting
Showing up, taking action, failing and pivoting cover the basic components of any good practice. However, you need to construct a practice that fits YOU. If you’re designing a practice based on someone else’s principles for success, you’ll eventually get stuck because somewhere along the way the strategies you’re implementing aren’t matched up to your strengths, lifestyle, skills, habits, values, goals — what I collectively refer to as natural writing forces.
3 STEPS TO YOUR BEST WRITING PRACTICES
Step 1. Examine the natural writing forces in your life. This includes all external forces (concrete and measurable factors) and internal forces (energies that are more emotion-based):
EXTERNAL FORCES
TIME – when do you write (duration/frequency)?
SPACE – where do you write?
TEAM – who makes up your support system?
SKILL – what do you naturally bring to the table, and what do you need to learn so you can grow?
PROCESS—what is your writing process, from story idea to full-blown manuscript?
GOALS - what is your desired outcome and how are you going to achieve it?
INTERNAL FORCES
VISION - why are you a writer? What does the call of writing do for you and how are you answering it? How will your writing impact others?
REAL-WORLD SELF - We writers must learn how to work with the traits and other aspects of our real-world selves. (Habits, moods, beliefs, values, fears.) These characteristics impact your creative life, and you need to figure out which ones support you and which ones hinder you.
DETERMINATION – Consider this philosophy: “If you’re more than 100% determined, you’re determined; if you’re exactly 100% determined, you’re slacking somewhere; if you’re less than 100% determined, you aren't.” How determined are you?
All of these forces are at play for every writer, and with daily intention you can learn how to build an effective writing practice that fits YOU.
WRITE WITH INTENTION
Step 2. Journal daily your intentions for your writing
What is the outcome I want to achieve?
What do I want to do? / What must I do? (in order to achieve the outcome)
What external and internal forces will support me in doing what I need/want to do?
How will I apply these forces today?
What can potentially block me? How could I potentially meet up with resistance?
What is my hack for any potential blocks or resistance?
How will success today lead me to my next landmark in my writing journey?
Okay, I’m a big believer in daily (or at least consistent) journaling. I think keeping a written record of our progress that monitors not just our daily word count but also our emotional landscape is hugely beneficial for umpteen reasons. In this post, I just want to focus on how the journaling can help us build a writing practice.
When we pose the seven questions above to ourselves before each writing session, we’re committing to doing so much more than simply writing words. We’re writing with the fundamental understanding that that day’s productivity will lead directly toward the next “landmark” in our writing journey. You get to pick your landmarks, and this should be based on your natural writing forces as well as what you want to achieve.
Landmarks can be anything that you need them to be. Examples include
writing a specific number of words or pages
research
taking a workshop
submitting pages to a writing coach
fleshing out a character
cutting a chapter down to a lower word count
and much more
When you link one “landmark” to another, you train yourself to understand that even the smallest achievements are crucial in leading you toward your Dream Goal. You also train yourself to understand that writing sessions should never be treated as isolated moments in that have no consequence. Everything you do in your journey makes a difference, no matter how small it may seem.
Just like a story has a plot, where each incident must lead to another, so must our writing journey follow a plot, where each landmark leads to another.
This means we need to have a clear understanding of the outcome and what we need to accomplish in order to achieve that outcome.
Setting intentions for all of your writing sessions or other necessary tasks is a fantastic tool that can help you establish the plot of your writing journey!
After a short while of setting intentions, following the guidance of those seven questions, you start to learn quite a bit about yourself. Don’t be surprised to discover that what you thought was a strength was actually an avoidance tactic, or what you thought was a bad habit was actually a cool time hack.
This is where the journaling becomes so much more than just a dumping ground for your thoughts and feelings. It’s a record keeper for everything. You can see trends develop over time, learn how certain situations trigger you, how you respond to disruptions.
Like I said above, I won’t go into journaling in-depth in this article, but just understand that it will be through your journaling that you’ll uncover all the external and internal forces in your creative life, realize how you respond to them, and begin the process of modifying challenges, or harnessing your strengths.
USING NATURAL WRITING FORCES TO CONSTRUCT YOUR WRITING PRACTICE
Step 3. Dive deep into the external and internal forces
The questions you’ll come up against will vary depending on your writing experience, your writing vision, your personality, and hundreds more reasons. Some of them may include:
What time of day do I write most efficiently? Why?
Do I require a warm-up session before my creative center really starts cranking out the juicy stuff? How do I know this?
Can I focus on my writing when the family is around? Why/Why not?
Am I willing to forsake my favorite TV show to write? Why/Why not?
If I don’t have a room to myself, can I get an hour to myself? How can I guard this time?
Is my spouse going to understand why I have to set my alarm at 5 am to write? The conversation we’ll have will take place……
Should I set deadlines? Under what terms? What do I do if I miss a deadline? Or meet one?
These questions will be framed differently from writer to writer. These don’t even skim the surface, but they can give you a general idea of what you need to be thinking about.
What you may have noticed is how often real-world circumstances impact your creative life. This is something many writers don’t take time to consider, or don’t outline strategies to combat.
For example, your real-world self may never have dreamed she’d wake up to go write her novel at 5 am, but your writer self would, and somewhere, the two have to compromise. Your writer self may never have anticipated that it’d be so difficult to finish a book (especially when it was sooo much fun to start writing it), and so now certain modifications to your schedule have to be made to support you in finishing that book.
Be prepared for your writing practice to develop over time. There will be a lot of trial and error as you get to know your writer self. Also, because your writer self will evolve over time, as will your real-world self, your writing practice will need updating. Regular check-ins through—you guessed it, journaling—will help spot changes in your creative development so that you can modify certain strategies to ensure you’re always playing to your strengths, meeting your goals, and on track to your personal writing success.
HAVE A WRITERLY DAY!