5 Lessons I learned from starting a writing streak

(plus 3 from breaking it)

At the beginning of June, I decided to challenge myself to do daily writing. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) always seemed like a mixed bag – great in theory, the idea being to write every day, but extremely overwhelming with how high the bar was set, and the amount of people I spoke to who mostly just felt burnt out or like a failure at the end of the month? Well, that’s maybe a topic for another post. I took my least favorite part of NaNo and changed it to fit with the things I had decided to cultivate in my life: consistency, no shame, no feeling like a failure, actual achievable goals.

This was written before the big NaNo / AI statement, there’s many more things that are my “least favorite” about NaNo now. Check out my thoughts on that debacle here:

I set my goal at a “measly” 50 words per day, and allowed the leeway of those words being whatever I wanted or needed that day: brainstorming/mind mapping, asking myself questions about my work, ideas in bullet points, outlining, or actual prose. Surely, even on a bad day, I could sit down for five minutes and write a few sentences.

As it turns out, I could totally do that! My streak lasted for 66 days! What happened on day 67? My old lady cat (who has a whole host of medical issues) had a pancreatitis flareup, resulting in about 2+ weeks of little sleep, emotional turmoil, anticipatory grief, (she’s fine now, even better than before the flareup!) but just like that, the streak was ended.

It’s been about three weeks since then at the time of writing this, and I wanted to reflect on my experiences, and the lessons I learned from both starting and continuing my writing streak, and from ultimately breaking it.

Getting started is 80% of the battle

50 words may not seem like very much, but that’s entirely the point! Even when I was unmotivated, grumbly, not feeling well, etc., I could tell myself “Look, we only need to get 50 words. It’s not that much, we can do it!” And so, I did. And some of those “bad” days, I definitely ended up just hitting the 50 words and calling it good enough, because it was! I had satisfied my goal, and I could go back to doom scrolling on youtube. But a grand majority of days, even the bad ones? I ended up writing hundreds of words! Once I had started, I found it was easy to keep going. Inertia and all that.

Building a habit is the key to consistency; and vice versa

Habits can be very difficult to develop; or at least, the right habits. Especially so for many neurodivergent brains, where the habit forming isn’t the problem, but instead it’s the doing anything consistently enough for it to become a habit. But after a few weeks of adding “writing” to my mental checklist for the day, being one of my “must dos”, and forcing myself to sit down and do the work, it started to become second nature. Some days it for sure felt like a chore, but like with most chores, once you do it, you generally feel WAY better. Writing is one of those sticky tasks that unfortunately, if you don’t sit down and do the work, the work doesn’t get done (rude, I know) and what I found was that by building this habit, building the consistency, I was actually getting the work done! As I said, 50 words doesn’t sound like a lot when you are talking about a 90k novel, but that 90k doesn’t just Vulcan mind meld itself out of your head and onto the page in one sitting (also rude, I know, I’m with you). It’s 50 words, on top of 50 words on top of… you get it (see #4); adding consistent, small amounts of writing to your routine can supplement those big writing days to get you to the finish line that much faster. Plus, it can help your subconscious do its thing if you consistently look at your work, letting all those ideas percolate.

Leave the ego, perfectionism, and shame at the door; writing anything is better than writing nothing

I was a “gifted kid” – I rarely studied, even in college, and the worst habit I ever developed with regard to writing was my ability to write a good essay in one go. I didn’t outline, I didn’t revise – heck, most of the time, all I did for proofreading was hit spellcheck. It worked, so I never had to change my pattern of behavior. Now that I’m writing novels, however, my process has to change. I need to learn how to revise, to outline, to be ok with putting “bad” words on the page, knowing they’ll never see the light of day.

It is hard to put work into something and then have to turn around and change it, delete it entirely, be told it’s not good. But wanting to avoid that leads to only wanting to write “good” words (which leads to writer’s block). At the end of the day, you have to get the “bad” words out. You need to read them and reconcile the fact that they don’t look or sound as good as they sounded in your head. And you need to learn how to fix them. Writing even when it’s not good is better than not writing at all. Writing “badly” will give us so many skills that we desperately need as writers: how to take criticism, how to revise, how to self-edit, and weirdly enough, how to write better on the first try.

Small, achievable goals produce big results

As I’ve mentioned, having a huge goal (write a novel) can be a daunting task; there’s a reason all the “motivation” folks tell us to break goals down into smaller parts! Our brains will literally sabotage us into thinking that small steps forward are meaningless because of how “insignificant” it is compared to the end goal. So, then what happens? We only write when we have hours of time to do so at once, or we don’t write at all! Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t always have hours to spend on writing, but I would easily bet that 99% of us have one minute every day. Even if half of that minute is spent reading your last few sentences, that still gives you 30 seconds to write a little bit more (as I mentioned in #1, usually this leads to magically finding that you have more time than you thought).

But Kara, you say, what’s the point of writing for 30 seconds?? Well, dear writer, I ask you: what’s the point of writing for an hour? Or 2 hours? Or 4? The point is the same: to write. Whatever your “why”, that’s the point. Use your notes app on your phone or create a private discord server to jot down ideas on the go. 30 seconds is that jolt of inspiration as you’re walking on your break, and you need to write it down before you forget. 30 seconds is reading that list of ideas you’ve been cultivating and deciding “actually, I’m not as busy as I thought I was because this idea is fascinating and I want to explore it.” I’m not suggesting that you “over-efficientize” yourself (no, that’s not a word, but you totally know what it means). Don’t be hyper-efficient, and spend every single second being productive. That’s actually counter-productive to the creative process (another post for more on that). But be more realistic about how much time you have to devote to writing. Even if it's only one minute, one sentence, one word – allow yourself the small steps and see how quickly the momentum builds.

Cat-Waxing; Sometimes you need to cut yourself off

Cat-waxing is this idea of doing something productive as a way to procrastinate something else. For example, reading this post instead of writing. It’s ok to do every once in a while; sometimes you need to refill the well, or take a break, or learn something new about craft, or get a new perspective, or work on other aspects of being a writer and human being (marketing, social media, community engagement, cleaning, etc.). But sometimes, you keep doing it and keep doing it, and ultimately, the thing you really need to do to improve is to just write. For me, it was my outline. As I mentioned above, I’ve never been great with outlining, and I consider myself a bit of a pantser/discovery writer. I very much feel like my characters make their own choices, and sometimes as I’m writing, they will go do something I didn’t have planned and I have to rethink everything to make that work. But, I was trying to outline my current WIP, because I felt like I didn’t have a good enough grasp of my characters or the plot. And working on my outline was an acceptable way to continue my streak. The problem was, I kept working on it. Tweaking things, adding things, sometimes writing full scenes within the outline (see: discovery writer). And I realized that I was using it as an excuse to not go back and rework the draft I had started (see: gifted kid, doesn’t like to revise). I knew that the moment I stopped working on my outline and actually went back to the drafting phase, I would have to obliterate a lot of words because I had discovered so much and it completely changed the beginning of my story. So, I gave myself a deadline for when I would be done with the outline and would switch over to drafting again. This is crucial for a writer’s success: understand and learn about yourself, your process, and know when you need to cut yourself off and move on to the next thing.

Those are some of the lessons I learned while succeeding at my challenge. But maybe more importantly, I learned from “failing” at my challenge, too.

This is not a failure, there is no shame. Moving forward is not “starting over”, it’s pressing play after a pause

One of the hardest things to do is to start doing something. But maybe even harder than that? Starting AGAIN. The first thing that’s difficult with that is simply needing to start again because you stopped. There is shame, guilt, feeling like a failure, like I should have done better. But objectively, I didn’t have a goal of “write every day FOREVER”, and just because I ended up finding a day where I didn’t write does not mean I failed. I learned a lot! And I gave myself grace to take care of my kitty, and take care of myself, and I knew I would start again when I could. I am incredibly proud of myself for doing what I did, and know that I’ve developed a skill that will help me continue to move forward.

The second part is the “why bother” mentality. This is a spiraling pit of despair that I find myself in frequently with writing. In this situation, it’s usually something like “I broke my streak, so now why bother? It’s like starting all over.” Wrong! You simply pressed pause, took the break, and now you’re pushing play again. All that work you did doesn’t just go away simply because you missed a day (or 20) – you have the work that you did, and you have the experience and knowledge you learned while doing it. When you break a writing streak, you don’t lose all of the words you wrote before! It can be extremely hard to pick something back up, but just remember that the resistance you feel is just your brain being a wee overprotective and playing tricks.

Counting the days was a blessing and a curse

Tying in to #1 a little bit here – counting the days of my streak was great for my motivation (“I can’t skip a day! My number won’t go up!”) but when I ultimately was unable to continue, I was put in an awkward situation. First, the feelings of failure, the feeling like I have to “start over”; and then, when I gave myself grace and said “ya know, this was a bit of a crisis. It’s ok, and it doesn’t count against my streak”, how do I continue to keep count from there? It was a “streak”, days in a row, I couldn’t just pick up where I left off, and I couldn’t count those days when I didn’t write. So, I’m doing away with the whole system altogether! I don’t track how many days straight I’ve flossed my teeth; I just do it. That’s what a habit is. So, while the days going up was good for my ego and motivation, I need to do away with the ego anyway, and stop relying on motivation to get things done, and instead build sustainable habits that allow me to actually enjoy the thing I love without all the shame and guilt and self-doubt.

I actually needed the break

The last thing I realized after breaking my streak? I really needed to. I had been cat-waxing, revisiting old scenes, and ultimately wasn’t making much progress. I was tired, a bit burnt out, and honestly? Nervous to have to go back and revise/delete a whole bunch of work to fit the new information I had discovered about the story. This break gave me the distance I needed to let my subconscious work through some more things, and refill the well, as it were. Breaks are incredibly important to the creative process, and while mine was forced on me, I still took it and recognized it for the blessing it was (or at least, the silver lining on a stormy rain cloud). Learn to recognize when the work you’re doing is less efficient, take the break you need, and you’ll find that you can come back more refreshed, energized, and maybe with the perfect answer to that pesky subplot hole.

Overall, I learned a lot during those two months, and one of the greatest takeaways is simply knowing that I can write every day. The confidence that comes with knowing that simple fact is amazing. Over those two months, I wrote almost 30k between outlining, brainstorming, and drafting. It’s no NaNoWriMo, but that’s 30k closer to my finished product. And that was with several 50-word days, and days that felt like 50-word days but ended up being more. Find your bare minimum, even if it’s only 30 seconds a day, and make that your goal. The results will amaze you.

Each of these lessons could be their own post, and I’d love to dive deeper into each of them! Let me know in the comments what lesson you want to learn more about first! What are you struggling with in your journey?