Matthew Hart Comedy: writing skills

3 Clever Ways to Help You Write Daily

By Matthew Hart

Keeping to a daily writing routine will create the greatest impact on your writing skills and productivity throughout your writing career.

Here are 3 Clever Ways to Help You Write Daily

1. Keep a Daily Journal or Diary

By keeping a daily journal or diary entry, you will gain two important benefits:

First, you will be showing up at the page to write every day which will develop the groundwork for your daily writing habit.

Second, you will be capturing your real to life events and your emotional responses towards those events and the people involved with them.

As your writing skills get better, your personal, daily, journal entries will become an invaluable resource for enhancing your writing.

Your daily journals will give you the foundation for your daily writing habit and will help you create fictional characters and worlds with three-dimensionality that will "ring true."

2. Start a Blog

You will gain two more benefits from starting your own blog:

First, by meeting a consistent publishing schedule you will be developing the self discipline required to write daily to meet your writing project deadlines.

Keep in mind, you are not required to publish daily. Once or twice a week is acceptable. Just keep to it.

Second, you will start to develop your writer's platform, as well as your fan base of excited readers who will want to get to know you better.

Your writer's platform allows you to engage with your readers.

Once you get to know who is reading your writing, you can begin to write with your readers in mind.

By engaging with your readers through your blog, you will build excitement around your next published work. You can also ask them for their opinions on story ideas and even recruit beta readers to give you notes.

Get involved. Get excited. These are your fans!

3. Write Short Stories

You will gain two great benefits from writing short stories.

First, you will gain more confidence as a writer as you begin meeting your production goals. By finishing one polished short story a week, you will find that it becomes easier to sit down and write every day because each day will represent a small step towards finishing a weekly goal.

Second, you'll be ready to publish your book of short stories as all those short stories have added up over time.

What started out as a simple daily writing practice has now become a viable commercial product!

Hopefully, you've been blogging about your writing experience and asking for your reader's opinions of your writing projects throughout the year because, guess what? You will now have an audience of readers waiting to buy your latest published book of short stories!

For example, here is my own book of short stories:

Uncle Matty's Halloween: Jokes, Bits & Anecdotes

I hope you can start using these 3 clever ways to help you write daily.

What are your daily writing habits?

SHARE YOUR DAILY WRITING ROUTINE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW

Continue your journey:

This Wireless Keyboard Just Topped My Wish List (Blog Post)

LET'S WRITE! 7 Day Writing Challenge (Blog Posts)

Learn To Write Funny (Blog Posts)

Or, hop over to my YouTube Coin Channel:

Matthew The Great Coin Roll Hunter

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and this blog uses Amazon Affiliate links.

This #1 Writer's Excuse Gets Busted

By Matthew L. Hart

Writer & Humorist

Author of:

Uncle Matty's Halloween: Jokes, Bits & Anecdotes

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it."
- M. Scott Peck

We are great creative writers.

I'll prove it to you.

I'll answer this question with you:

Why aren't we writing every day?

"I don't have the time.

I'm too tired to write.

I'm too busy."

I'm about tapped out and bored already.

You may have come up with more or less, similar, excuses.

They aren't bad but, let's be honest, they're all kind of rudimentary.

So, let's try this again.

This time, I want you to set a timer for three minutes.

I like using sand timers for this kind of thing.

KSM UP Sand Timer 6 Colors Hourglass 1/3/5/10/15/30 Minutes Sandglass Timer Sand Clock for Kids Games Classroom Kitchen Home Office Decoration (Pack of 6)

Now, we write from our stream of consciousness on a new question:

Why ARE you writing every day?

I'll join you:

GO!

"I am writing every day so that my writing skills will be honed. I am becoming a Master Storyteller and as part of my training, I MUST write every day. I am writing every day to become more diciplined in my craft. I want to be able to spin compelling stories around a campfire with my family and friends. I want to tell stories that inspire people. I want to tell stories that change the world in a positive way. The only way I will be able to accomplish these things is if I write every day. I am a writer, so I write. I look forward to writing every day because I know that I will be one step closer to reaching my goal of becoming a Master Storyteller. There is no person out there just like me. By writing every day, I am expressing all that I am and contributing to the world."

TIME'S UP!

Wasn't that a lot more fun?

Looks like I had a whole lot more to write about, too.

Here's my point:

When writing becomes fun, it becomes easy.

Did you notice how uninspired our excuses were from the first question?

I believe that is because it's a negatively framed question.

I think it's much more fun to postulate on the positive.

Again, we're trying to make the writing experience something fun we want to do.

Also, did you notice I put no time constraints on us to write the answer to our first question?

We had the

"full-time cabin in the woods without

distractions" framework to answer this question

which I'm sure you also felt very opinionated about.

But, when we answered the question,

"Why aren't we writing every day?"

what did we write?

A paragraph?

Page?

A sentence?

Or, even a manuscript?

I didn't even write a paragraph!

I literally had a list of cliched excuses.

They weren't even original or fun!

Let's take a look at the first item on my list of excuses of why I am NOT writing every day:

"I don't have the time!"

Now, let's bust this #1 writer's excuse!

We do have the time.

I have the time.

You have the time.

Everyone has three minutes to write about why they would like to write every day.

There you have it.

Writer's Actionable:

Every day, after you have brushed your teeth and right before you go to bed, I want you (us) to take three minutes to write down our answer to this question: "Why am I writing every day?"

That's it.

Answer the same question every night before you go to bed.

Even if you have already worked on a writing project, I want us to continue to write the answer to this question every day before bed.

If you were to busy all day?

Still write the answer to this question and know that you have just written something for the day.

Mastering your time is the first step to mastering your daily writing routine.

Why do you want to write every day?

SHARE YOUR ANSWER WITH US

IN THE COMMENTS BELOW

your journey:

This Wireless Keyboard Just Topped My Wish List (blog post)

How To Use Story Sticks To Break Through Writer's Block