2 Ways To Get Started Writing Each Day

Many years ago, I learned something vitally important from writers I admired--writers who had published dozens of books.

The truth they shared? Keep your focus on your work in progress every day. Staying with it day after day is the key to keep going to the end.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about those who wait for inspiration, and how that's not a good thing. What you need is to take action, and that's what this post is about.

Every morning when a writer faces the computer monitor, there's that moment of "Ugh. I don't want to do this."

Now that's not really the truth. It's a lie--it's the inertia we all feel about starting the work day. For a writer, that means pulling words out of your brain. Writing that first sentence is the hardest sentence of the day.

I learned early in my career to make it easy to get started each day by leaving nothing to chance.

Writers who don't write regularly have a difficult time getting the words to flow. Sometimes the flow is less than a drizzle, only a drip or two. If they give up, it's even harder the next day. Here are...

2 Ways To Get Started Writing Each Day

(1) Pros prime the pump every day by leaving a dangling thread on the previous day's work. That thread makes it easy to dive into the work the next day. That may mean not finishing a chapter, but quitting a few sentences short from doing that. Then the next morning, you know exactly what you must first do. Or maybe it means not even finishing a sentence, but leaving it hanging.

Example: Jack read the letter, his panic increasing with every word. What could...

When the next morning rolls around, finish that sentence, and you'll find you keep going.

(2) Prime the pump, so to speak, by reading over what you wrote the previous day, and then dive into the current day's writing.

Do not edit if you're in rough draft. You want to get the story to the end.

If you see something you want changed, make a note and stick it on your outline or your monitor or in a running log of changes.

Takeaway Truth

Try these tips to keep you moving forward--toward the end of your project. When you've made the habit of starting every day with the thread you left, you'll save yourself time, angst, and also learn to enjoy the journey.