So it’s been a LONG time since I’ve checked in around here. Or around anywhere, really. Too long.

I’ve been on a sort of hiatus for the last four months or so, pretty much since the release of my latest novel, Alfred Arnold’s Great Adventure of No Direction Whatsoever. It was around that time that I lost my “dream” job and had to struggle a little to make ends meet. Worst of all, it was around that time that I lost hope of any success as a writer.

The problem was I just sat around with three published books, waiting for success to fall in my lap. I wasn’t doing anything to make my writing succeed and I wasn’t taking the effort to learn from my mistakes. Instead, I made no plans and kept no regularity.

I needed to learn how to write again.

What I mean is that I needed to learn how to love writing again. How to make it as essential to my day as brushing my teeth — something that I just can’t feel right until I’ve completed it. There were three main keys to achieving this.

Regularity

The most important thing in the world of writing is doing it every day. I used to only write when the “mood” struck, whatever that means. That means I’d get maybe 10,000 words written in one month. That should be what I’m writing every few days, and it is now.

Ideally, you’d want to write at the same time every day. That kinda trains your body in a Pavlovian manner, forcing the “mood” to strike reliably at the same time each morning, evening, or whenever you feel you write best. This is true for any routine you might form in your life. You can’t wake up without finishing your first cup of coffee. You don’t feel fulfilled unless you work a good sweat out.

I use an app called Todoist to organize my daily to-dos. For writing, I set it for the same time every day and use it to hold myself accountable.

On top of that, I record my progress, and that makes me want to stay regular with my writing. I measure my words-per-day, any variables in how I’m writing (on laptop, via dictation, etc), and my words-per-hour, which I’ll go into more next. Keeping dates on all of those things gives me a rewarding feeling when I see weeks in a row, each day with a lot of data recorded.

Speed

Not a lot of people like to hear this, but writing a lot and rather quickly is crucial when it comes to self publishing. There are scores of books about studying the market, writing books designed to sell, and other business things that I won’t go into (mostly because I’m not successful. You don’t take tech advice from an Amish guy, you know what I mean?) that you should certainly read a few of. But I can go into the actual writing of it.

I read Chris Fox’s “5,000 Words Per Hour” not too long ago, and it’s honestly changed my writing output in a crazy way. In the book, Chris talks about writing sprints, where you just spew as much word sludge at your screen as you possibly can in short bursts of about twenty to thirty minutes. As soon as I started doing this, I was reaching regular speeds of 3,000 words per hour. Now that’s not nearly as much as Chris’s title says you can achieve, but I get faster every day.

There’s a lot of people I know who would say “Well, writing fast is all well and good, but are the words you write worth reading?” That’s a fair question, but the answer is yes due to the magic of editing. Imagine editing is this machine that compresses coal (fast writing) right into diamonds (good writing). You’re down in the coal mine trying to get as many diamonds as possible. Would it be more efficient to look for the diamonds already embedded in the mine, or just mine as much coal as possible and run it through your machine?

In writing, there’s no turd you can’t polish.

Get Inspired

Start dreaming. Then dream again. And dream some more.

You need that fuel to keep going. If your dream is to have a New York Times bestseller, then keep picturing how sweet that day will be when it comes. If it’s to be able to live off your self-published income, then go to bed each night with that goal embedded in your mind. Don’t delude yourself or get a big head about it. You don’t even have to share it. But identify your dream and start going after it.

Then get writing. Just like me, you have a long road ahead of you. But you’ll get to your destination if you just keep walking.

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