15 Minutes a Day – Your Most Important Writing Habit

As mentioned in my previous blog post, Yes, You Really Can Do It, starting off any major writing project like a novel, screenplay, short story collection, etc., can seem quite daunting. Terrifying, really.

Like, stop-you-in-your-tracks intimidating.

If you have ever sat there at your desk or in your local coffee shop and stared at a blank page / screen that only seemed to get blanker the longer you stared at it, then you know what I mean.

And it makes sense – if you have never written anything quite that long before you may understandably be at a loss as to where and how to start.  Well, I have good news for you – there is an easy solution to your problem: just write a little bit, every day, and don’t judge what you wrote.

I suggest starting with carving out 15 minutes from your day where you have no distractions and can just be there with your mind, your page / screen and 15 minutes to yourself.  Once there, just start writing.  Anything will do, even if (and sometimes especially) when what you are writing has nothing at all to do with the concept / idea you planned to write about.

Just let the words come out, about anything – or nothing – at all.  Even writing down, “Here I am sitting at my desk, typing these very words onto my screen with no idea where I am going next…”  is a major victory and a fantastic start.  You see, I believe that we all have writing muscles in our brain, and just like our physical muscles, your mental writing muscles need to be exercised before they can loosen up and start performing.

Even writing gibberish for 15 minutes will help – so long as you dedicate another 15 minutes tomorrow and then the day after that.  4-5 days a week should be frequent enough to make a difference while still giving you the freedom to skip a day or two guilt-free here and there. 

If you can discipline yourself enough for 15 minutes a day for 4-5 days in the next week, I bet dollars to donuts that by the end of that first week you will find yourself writing 20, 30, 45 minutes at a time, well beyond what you had planned.

This is because once you shake the rust off and get your writing muscles in a little bit of shape, the words will come more easily. You may even find that ideas, characters, scenes, plotlines and more will also start to coalesce in your brain. And I strongly recommend that you do not bother to edit or “fix” anything you have written in these writing practice sessions. Editing comes later – much later – a process we will discuss in greater detail in subsequent blog posts.

Just make sure to set aside the time and attention to get as many words out of your brain as you can before you have to get onto putting out the next fire in your regular life.

Also, and I feel strongly about this, keep everything you write – even the gibberish.  I guarantee you will not be able to separate garbage from gold in the moment, and you never want to discard something that might come in handy later – perhaps for some other completely unrelated writing project. For example, the “throwaway” example sentence I gave above could be the kernel of a character, or perhaps simply a musing on the nature of frustration which could come in handy later.

Keep it all! You never know what random sentence, description of a river, line of dialogue, character trait, etc. will come in handy down the road.

So if you are nervous about starting – don’t be – because you aren’t sitting down to write a book.  You’re just sitting down to practice writing for a short time, and 15 minutes of low-expectation writing is a heck of a lot easier to wrap your head around than writing the next great American novel from scratch.

Consider committing to 15 minutes a day for 5 days over the next week and remember not to be judgemental of what you do write – there will be plenty of time for critical reviews, rewriting and editing later in the process.  For now, just focus on the act of writing and consider every word written a victory – because it is!  Everything you write today is infinitely more than the nothing you wrote yesterday.

I predict that at the end of that first week you will find that your writing muscles are in much better shape and now almost demand to be used more regularly, which is exactly the outcome we want.

15 minutes a day.  Keep everything. Celebrate getting started.

Happy writing!