Ev BogueOctober 25, 2011
G. Asked: How do you stay motivated to write every day?
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I haven't always written every day.
I first started writing every day when M. left to wander the country with her guitar in my guitar case in 2008. I was bored and frustrated at my job in New York, so every day I would leave at 4:59pm, bike across the Williamsburg Bridge where I would sit on a bench outside a cafe and write in a notebook until my mind switched off and I could relax around the words.
Through the years, I've taken breaks from writing every day. I always start up again at some point, when I want to (or sometimes needed to in order to earn more money.)
I started writing every day again in October 2009, when I started a blog that eventually grew to be read by over 80,000 people: Far Beyond The Stars. I did this because I was trying a whole bunch of other Things for income when I moved to Portland, Or after I quit my job. Writing, for some reason, seemed to resonate with the people of the world.
In a way, I chose to be a professional writer because it chose me. I was the most successful at it, and it gives me the most freedom to move around in the world.
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I started publishing every day on July 27th 2011 after I took a digital sabbatical for nearly a month. When I came back, I realized that it would be beneficial to push something into the Internet every single day.
Sometimes this is challenging, other times it's not. I've developed a few strategies, such as writing like I talk, writing from experience, measuring experience and writing every day to help me.
I also tend to not worry too much about making grammatical or spelling errors. These do happen, but I've found that worrying about them causes them to happen more often. I'm writing on the Internet, so errors can be fixed after the fact.
I tend to write more introductory and invitational work on the free daily letter, and write deeper more "what's going on with me and the deeper work I'm doing" writing on Evolving Your Digital Work.
I've found that once I write my free daily letter, it's easier for me to continue how to write Get Paid to Write and Evolving Your Digital Work later in the day.
When I'm having a hard day, I say to myself: just write the easiest thing to can think of! Usually, those posts resonate best with a large group of readers anyway -- because they're simple!
The amazing thing about writing every day is that it starts to become a habit, and thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. After a month of writing every day, it started to feel very natural to me.