I Write Best When…

I’m sure you’ve heard it before.

You, as an aspiring (or current), writer have checked on the writing habits of your favorite writers.

Sometimes they say, “I write best in the early morning” or “I write during my lunch break” or some other such variation.

I want to say (but may be remembering wrong) that it was Stephen King who said he forces himself to write whether he feels like it or not. Actually, I’m sure there’s several writers (famous or not) who have said that.

A guy I know, who’s extremely busy with non-writing activities, writes in-between clients, even if it’s just a sentence or two. And he managed to write several books that way.

So you go ahead and try it yourself.

Maybe it works for you, for a while, then fails.

Maybe it never works for you.

My own writing is very hit-or-miss.

Sometimes I write and write and write like I’m obsessed.

Other times, months will go by without my writing anything.

That’s mainly why all my previous blogs failed, because I was inconsistent.

In fact, one of the reasons I started writing about my stock and options trading isn’t because I want to get others to do it, nor because I particularly want people to know about my trading, it’s because I’ll [hopefully] be more consistent with writing.

Consistency is the key.

It’s not about getting up at 4am to write, or staying up until 1am, or tying up all your break times in order to write something.

It’s about writing, consistently.

Get a voice recorder, record your thoughts, and transcribe them (use a program or hire someone), write a few sentences here or there, set a block of time every other day, force yourself to write every day, it doesn’t matter.

It honestly doesn’t matter, like, at all.

What matters is finding what works best, most consistently, for you. Something you’ll stick with.

Try a way, if it doesn’t work, try a different way.

But don’t confuse a momentary lapse as confirmation of failure.

What I mean by that is, if you decide to get up an hour earlier to write, and you do it some days and don’t do it other days, that may not be a sign that it doesn’t work for you.

It may be a sign that you’re heading in the write direction (see what I did there?) and you need to keep at it in order for it to become a habit.

And sometimes what used to work for you stops working. And that’s okay. Find something else that works.

Just keep writing.