What motivates you to write?

There are only a couple of creative habits that I try to practice every day. Writing is both of them. In the mornings, I journal. Lately, I’ve also been taking time to read and write over 15-20 minute intervals. It’s a great feeling to maintain these reflective and creative practices. Journaling is a non-negotiable for me — it is one of the most calming parts of my day. Daily creative writing, though, is new for me.

“Habit is persistence in practice.”

– Octavia Butler

It’s satisfying to spend a little time each morning focusing on something that brings me absolute joy, even when I don’t feel like doing it at first. Although I have been writing every day, non-negotiably, I may eventually need to relax my writing frequency a little (to at least 5x/week, maybe).

Lately, Craft Docs has been my daily facilitator for regular writing. A feature that I’ve wanted in Craft Docs is a word count log to tell me how much I’ve written over a given day within a space. As of today, we don’t have that feature, so I recently created a separate document to encourage myself to write regularly. I decided to get serious about book writing. Here’s a log that I designed to hold myself accountable and keep me excited about seeing steady progress.

These are the basic steps.

1. Create a separate document to track your daily word count.
2. Write!
3. Check your page stats for the word count of the full document (For word count accuracy, the writing has to be done on a single document or pages within a single document, separate from your words log).
4. Open your “words log” and add the current word count for the day (I have the document for the log pinned in my book writing folder. It’s helpful for me to stay motivated.).

That’s it! I’m sure that this process could be more fancy, perhaps with tables. This is just a simple method that I wanted to share that’s been helping me over the past couple of months. Happy writing!

Notes

• I fluctuate between writing in Craft Docs and Ulysses. Ulysses has better features for blog posting, focus modes, and built-in goals. For these reasons, my long-form writing is migrating more toward Ulysses these days.
• I am still using Craft Docs for my notes and log, but I am now using it for more qualitative (like how the book is shaping up, my energy level for writing) instead of quantitative (word count) goals. But this word count log really helped me to get a good start!

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