How to build a habit of writing daily?

6 points by NithurM ↗ HN
Writing has became an inevitable key for success. Most successful people write today as a way of self-discovery. Also writing is also an billions worth of industry. So what are your ideas on building a writing habit? How do you do it?

4 comments

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Easy to say, but not to do: start writing every day.

There is a hack.

Choose a throwaway HN or Reddit account and commit to writing just one sentence about one article every day. Give yourself permission for the result to suck. All you need is one sentence, then you can be done with writing for the day.

But it must be every day, whether you feel like it or not.

What you'll find is that very often once sentence turns into two, and so on until you feel you're done.

You'll get immediate feedback. Keep this up on a particular topic, and you'll eventually start to figure out what clicks with a very specific audience.

At that point you can stop posting to HN or Reddit and start a blog if you feel like it. If you don't want public attention, use a private log where you store your articles.

After you've done this for a while, pick up a book or two on writing. You'll notice some habits you picked up that are helpful or harmful. Now you can work on them. The advice in the book won't be abstract because you'll immediately see yourself and know the behaviors to address for increase or decrease.

Absolutely best idea. Never heard someone give this advice. Thank you.
Agreed, but I'd put a "open a twitter account" as a middle step. It's still short, but you have now to write to the void instead of somebody.

Once you are comfy with that, a blog is easy.

However, pick a topic you like. I wrote about things I didn't care about professionally, and this is my worst work, also it's exhausting. But writing about Python, I can do for days.

There are many different forms of writing (https://ivypanda.com/essays/various-forms-of-writing/), but for me the best idea was to start my own diary, every day in the morning or in the evening I wrote down my thoughts, experiences or some ideas, reviews about books, films, TV shows, some moments of my life that touched me. I liked it so much that I trained myself to the daily practice of writing.