Friday, May 1, 2015

Writing: How to Write on A Daily Schedule

Whether you are writing a novel, a short story, or even a screenplay, finding time in your daily schedule to do so can be stressful. Writing consistently on a daily schedule can be even harder.

Trust me, I know.

I have gone days, weeks, sometimes even months between writing sessions. However, I recently figured out how to get myself writing on a daily schedule. Helping me finish two short stories and a screenplay over the past year. In this guide, I will give you advice on how I learned to write on that daily schedule.

Find the time of day that works for you.

The first thing you need to do is find yourself the right time of day. The best time that you will be able to sit down, away from all the distractions of life, and focus on your writing. I would recommend a time frame anywhere between 1 to 3 hours. Mornings, afternoons, even if it is midnight, find your time and lock it down.

Set small reachable daily goals.

Setting small reachable daily goals will not only inform you of how much you accomplished that day, but will also help motivate you. Completing these goals can help build inspiration inside yourself, driving you to complete more each day.

I tend to go by word count or page count, depending on what I am writing. When I write fiction, I aim for a 300 to 500 word count goal in one writing session. When writing a screenplay, I aim for a goal of 2 to 4 pages per day.

The amount of words or pages you set for yourself to reach each day is up to you, but making them reasonable is the key part. Starting yourself off with an unrealistic daily goal will not only set you up for failure, but not attaining that goal will drown your motivation from those failures. Set your goal low, and aim to hit that goal each day. You can always up the goal as you start new projects and are more accustomed to writing every day.

Write.

Write. Write. Write. Stick with it and I promise you will become accustomed to it. The more you get use to writing daily, the more you will feel odd when you skip a day. You might feel like your writing is moving along slowly, but the key to it all is that it is consistent. You will be able to finish things a lot faster than writing whenever you feel like it. In the end, you will accomplish more, and the more you accomplish, the more you will look forward to doing it.

Try not to skip a day unless you truly have to.

There will come days where you might not be in the writing mood. You might want to just skip a day, which is fine, but whenever I skip a day of writing I feel like nothing was accomplished. On those days, use some of the things you love doing to help motivate you to get just a little writing finished. For me, I use video games and television as a motivator. I force myself to get at least one hour of writing complete before jumping into a video game, catching up with a television show, or watching a movie. I might not always feel it going in, but once I am done with my hour writing session, I am happy that I actually did.

If you do skip a writing day here or there, that is fine. I mean, sometimes life happens. If you can, make it more like a reward to yourself than anything. For example, if you greatly exceed one of your daily word or page count goals, then taking a day off would be a nice reward.

Things to consider.

The suggestions I have given you here all stem from the fact that you have outlined everything that you are going to write. If you have everything mapped out, then getting yourself into a daily writing schedule will go fast and smoothly. If not, you can also use this same process for creating an outline, working on it a little each day before diving into the writing portion, never skipping a beat and never loosing that daily writing habit.

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In conclusion, I wish you luck with whatever it is you are writing. I am not an expert, just a guy with a passion for writing, but hopefully some of the things I stated here can help you to write on a daily schedule.