cracks knuckles
Time to put that $50,000 Liberal Arts degree to work
Lol.
I would recommend any writer start by reading “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King alongside or followed by “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. There are many, many, many books on writing, and few of them are useful, these two are because they hit at the core of what writing is all about without all the theory fluff–that while interesting, is pretty useless until you’re well into your habit and ready to expand. You’re a busy dude, so if you don’t got time to read, I fully understand.
I don’t know what your writing goals are or why you want to write, so the following is ultra general and will help literally anyone, regardless of what their endgame with writing is.
The Daily Free Write
Time 10 minutes/day.
How
- Sit down with a pen/pencil and a notebook–alternatively, you can use a Word document.
- Start a timer for 10 minutes.
- Write without stopping for 10 solid minutes
- Repeat daily for at least 1 month. Ideally, you would repeat until armageddon, but that’s up to you.
Notes
Your goal is to write continuously, without stopping for the entire time, regardless of any mental, physical, or other distraction that may arise. No matter what, DO NOT STOP. Pay absolutely no mind to the content of your writing, that’s beside the point.
The exercise is training your ability to allow uninterrupted words to flow from the subconscious. This exercise–if done with discipline and often–allows you to access “the muse” that force that writers often speak of. That force that seems to take over your body and write the piece for you. From a more scientific perspective, this exercise is training you to access Flow State while writing.
To reiterate, your only concern is that you write without stopping for the entire time.
Example
Hi, my name is John and I like to write and I really don’t know what to say and my wife is pretty cool and I like dogs, but dogs are kinda ugly sometimes and they like to eat shit and smell ass and that’s okay I guess and what am I even doing and I don’t know what to write and I don’t know what to say…
Etc, the first few times you may produce something like the above, a completely mangled and strange stream of consciousness that makes little sense and is of little artistic or personal value, but over time, you will notice that the quality, coherence, and usefulness of your free-writes improves. You may even find yourself spontaneously writing poetry or fiction. Many of my stories began as spontaneous emanations from free writing.
When it comes to the choice of writing medium, I would personally recommend that everybody start with a pen and paper, at least for the first few weeks-months.
The reason why is because handwriting is a skill that is massively undervalued and used and in the beginning stages, I would argue strongly that the ROI is far higher than typing.
Writing by hand uses very different neural circuitry than typing. I’m not going to argue which is better and which is worse in the long run, but I will argue that in the beginning stages, everyone could benefit from a 10-minute handwritten free-write.
There you go, you now have a writing habit.
So far as I’m concerned (and many writers who are actually worth a shit–unlike yours truly–would agree), freewriting is the utter, most fundamental skill/practice to any writer. Ingrain this habit, and you can expand in any direction you like.
edit
Timing. If you can, first thing in the morning is ideal because your brain is naturally more open and receptive. However, other things you are doing might be more important to make use of those early morning hours, so just pick a time that works and stick to it.
then relax through it, and it’ll turn back around soon enough.