Despite the heady rush of National Novel Writing Month and writers who claim to write 6-8 books a year, we are a firm proponent of slow and steady wins the race. You don’t have to be a speedy writer to finish a story or novel. You simply have to write.
In a post on Jane Friedman’s blog, Sharon Oard Warner also says that a daily writing habit can add up to a lot of creativity. For Warner, her resolution came when her children were small and she had little time to write. She started waking an hour earlier than necessary every morning to work on her short fiction. While she was rusty at first, soon the words started flowing. “A month or two in, I saw progress: Words lined up in neat little sentences. Sentences lined up in neat little rows,” Warner writes. “Each morning, I began by reading what I’d written the day before. My first achievement was getting my writing life back.”
Seven years passed between her return to a regular writing schedule and the publication of her first short story collection. “But one resolution, faithfully kept, changed the trajectory of my career. It made everything I’ve done since possible,” Warner writes.
