Choose Good Writing Habits

This article is for: Beginner and Intermediate poets

There’s a lot of research showing that people who form good habits are likely to be happier, healthier, more successful, wealthier—and just about anything else you might want to be!

So that’s why it’s super helpful to create good habits for your writing.

Almost every professional writer you’ve ever heard of has their own writing habits. David Morley told me once that he does 2 hours writing every afternoon, without fail. Some write in the dawn, some at night, some in sheds, and some in libraries—but they all have habits that they can rely on.

I am so convinced by the power of habit that whenever I find an issue in my writing that I want to work on, I think first about what habit I can create to fix it.

If you want to write better, more often, and more happily, you need good writing habits.

Why do habits work so well?

Habits mean you don’t have to make choices or use willpower

Choices can be hard—how do we know we’re making a good one? And willpower is hard too—research suggests that we only have a limited amount of it.

So if you’re always choosing whether or not to write, using your willpower to do so, you’re setting yourself up for trouble! Sooner or later you’re going to be overwhelmed by choice, or called away by options that are easier.

Whereas if writing is a habit, you can just get on with it!

Habits neutralize fears

I’ve said before that fear is normal. Successful writers have it too, but they go ahead and write anyway.

However, for the rest of us, that can be a very hard pattern to establish. How can you write when you’re scared it will all go wrong?

Habit is a great way of overcoming fear. After all, habits are not something we fret over—we just do them. So if writing is a habit, something you just do, there’s much less chance for your fears to get the better of you.

Here Are Some Good Writing Habits To Get Started With

Write Frequently

The more often you write, the better. Then it becomes truly an automatic thing that you do, and not a big choice you have to make every day. (There are also creativity benefits that come with frequent writing—I’ll say more about that another time.)

I think it’s ideal to write every day, if you can. It doesn’t have to be for a long time: as I’ve said before, just 15 minutes can be enough. But there is something magical about writing every day.

If you can’t manage every day, try to make it as often as you can. Then be gentle on yourself on the first day back after a break—they’re always the hardest!

Write with the Same Cues Each Time

Strong habits often happen when we experience particular “cues.”

I’m sure you’re familiar with this at home.

For example, maybe every time you see the kettle, you find yourself making a cup of tea? The kettle is the cue, and the tea is the habit that follows when you experience the cue.

Or it might be: See cookie jar (cue), eat cookie! (Not such a good habit…)

You can make use of repeated cues to strengthen your writing habit. For example, you might:

Write at the same time every day
Always write in a particular location
Always use a particular pen or notebook
Always listen to a particular piece of music
Make a particular kind of drink in a particular cup before starting

…and many more.

By doing these things repeatedly before you write, your brain will make an automatic connection between that time/place/object/activity, and starting to write. That way, whenever you experience the cue, your brain will expect you to start writing, and writing will come easier and easier.

Start with a Ritual

As Twyla Tharp puts it in her book The Creative Habit, humanity created rituals—repeated actions—to give ourselves a sense of control over a dangerous, untamed world.

Well, if starting a poem isn’t like going into a wild, untamed world, I don’t know what is! And having a ritual that you perform every time you begin can be a great way to calm yourself and get ready.

By ritual, I don’t mean dancing round the fire dressed in feathers (though feel free to do that if it helps!). I mean a short, simple pattern of actions that you always do when you first sit down to write.

Here’s my ritual.

I open my notebook at the front end and write the date, in full, in green pen.
Then with my fountain pen I note down, in prose notes, something I’ve observed in the last 24 hours.
I switch on my laptop and do a short freewrite—usually 2-3 minutes.
I turn to the back end of my notebook, and write the date again in green pen, but in short form this time. I write diary-style for a few minutes, checking in with myself about how I feel that day.
Then I’m ready to move on and write properly.

I LOVE this routine—I always do it. It can take me 30 minutes, or it can take 3, but I always do it. And it has helped me enormously to become much, much more productive than I used to be.

Establish a Protected Time and Place

Try to make it a habit to write someplace where you won’t be disturbed.

For the deep focus that makes for really good creativity, you need a time and place that’s sacrosanct—make it a habit to give this to yourself.

If other people in your life need to learn to respect this new habit of yours, then you’ll have to try to teach them! If they can’t learn it, like small children, then see if you can pick a time to write when you’re already away from them anyway. And remember, even 15 minutes can be enough.

Write Anyway

Now I will completely contradict myself! While it’s very helpful to have rituals and repeated patterns for most writing time, I think it’s also important to remind ourselves occasionally that these are not essential.

So, every so often, make yourself do something different, and write anyway.

If you always want silence, write in a busy café. If you hate writing at home (like me), make yourself write at home. If you always write at 9 in the morning, write at 7 in the evening.

It’s good to know you can be flexible—you want your habits to enable you, not trap you.

Feed and Water your Creativity

All seeds can grow. All seeds can create great plants. But not all seeds will go on to create the plants they could have. Some won’t grow at all, and some will grow only stunted.

How come? Well, so much depends on what happens to the seed. Did it fall on a rock or on rich soil? Did it get water or drought? Sun or shade?

Your creativity is kind of like that. We can all create. But some of us do, and some of us don’t, and the difference depends on how effectively we nurture our creativity.

Just as seeds need soil, water, and sun, your unconscious needs a steady flow of observations, images, words, phrases, thoughts, and dreams, for ideas to take root and grow in. So all the time, especially when you’re not actually working on a poem, you should be gathering these things.

Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones calls this making “compost.” Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls it “filling the well.” Whatever you call it, it means noticing things, and preferably writing them down.

So keep a notebook, and make it a habit to write in it often.

Write about anything: nature, yourself, snatches of talk, last night’s TV, the news, what you’re reading, etc. Take yourself places that you think you’ll find interesting, and note what you see. Do some art, or dance, and then write about it.

The more you do this, the more ideas you’ll find you have available to you when you come to work on a poem.

Read poetry

There’s simply no better way to be inspired, to learn, and to feel your love for poetry, than to read it. Try to make time to read poetry every day.

It doesn’t have to be a long time: just 15 minutes per day can be enough.

If you’re not reading when you’re writing, likely you’ll struggle. If you read for 15 minutes every day, you’ll likely find it easy. It’s that simple!

Next Steps

Think of ONE area of your writing that you’d like to improve.
Maybe you want to overcome a block, start more poems, or come up with richer ideas, or complete more poems, or finish poems sooner.
Think of a HABIT that could help you with this problem.
—To overcome a block, try Starting With a Ritual or Writing with the Same Cues
—To start more poems or finish poems sooner, try Writing Frequently.
—To create richer ideas, try Feeding Your Unconscious or creating a Protected Time and Place.
Plan when you’ll start the habit, and tell anyone whom you need to support you in it.
Start it!

Good Luck!