In a post on Writer Unboxed, Greer Macallister asks about our New Year’s resolutions. “Chances are, at some point on the first day of the year, you did one of two things: followed an existing habit or tried to build a new one,” she says. “Habits keep us from having to invent ourselves from scratch every single day.”
In the past year, Macallister got out of the habit of writing and found it hard to get back into it. “Having let other things take precedence, I’d not only gotten out of the writing habit–I’d replaced it with other habits, some important and productive, some less so,” she explains. “I had to decide that the writing habit was important, that certain other things could take a backseat, and that rebuilding the writing habit was more complex than just finding or making time to sit down to write again.”
Even when she made time, the writing didn’t come as easily as it used to when she had developed a habit of daily writing. “Maybe I was putting down 500 words or 2000, maybe 15 minutes or two hours, editing one page or ten chapters, but I was writing,” Macallister says. “My brain knew, when I sat down at my computer, that I didn’t have time to mess around.”
Macallister used some tricks to help her develop her habit, including playing a theme song when she sat down to write, treating herself to writing snacks, and setting up a special place where she would work on fiction. “I deliberately rebuilt the habit with a bundle of circumstances around it that would remind me of all the productive writing I’d done in the past,” she says. “That helped break some of the bad habits I’d developed (e.g. checking Twitter ‘real quick’) that had pushed productive writing to the wayside.”
