Choosing Your Habit
By Greer Macallister | January 2, 2023 |
How did you start off the New Year? Did you commit yourself to getting off on the right foot with a healthy, productive regimen of physical and mental activity? Or did you sleep in, savoring the holiday weekend? A little of both, maybe? Chances are, at some point on the first day of the year, you did one of two things: followed an existing habit or tried to build a new one.
We humans are creatures of habit. This isn’t a bad thing, or a good one; it just is. Habits keep us from having to invent ourselves from scratch every single day. Habit makes our days flow. Habit keeps things running.
2022 was a year of major change for me. I moved a family of four twice, once to temporary quarters while we renovated and sold a house, then to the new house we’d bought several states away. Somewhere along the way, I got out of the habit of writing. It’s understandable, of course–I had other priorities, all of which were more immediately pressing than putting another thousand words on the page–but understanding didn’t make me at peace with it, and I’d been feeling vaguely guilty. I’d think Oh, I should write, and then I just… didn’t.
Because once I was out of the habit, it was oh so hard to get back in. Having let other things take precedence, I’d not only gotten out of the writing habit–I’d replaced it with other habits, some important and productive, some less so. So it wasn’t just a question of saying “Oh, other things are less urgent now, so I can get back to writing!” I had to decide that the writing habit was important, that certain other things could take a backseat, and that rebuilding the writing habit was more complex than just finding or making time to sit down to write again.
I was tough on myself during that transitional period. Because I kept sitting down to write, and shuffling my outline around, so I was spending time at my computer, but the writing still wasn’t coming. Why can’t I just do this? I asked myself. I used to just sit down, and even if I wasn’t feeling particularly motivated, I could make words. Why can’t I do it now?
Then the answer finally occurred to me. Because I used to be in the habit.
I’ve never been one of those “You have to write every day!” writers, but the truth is that historically, when I’ve been in a deadline crunch, daily writing got me through. Maybe I was putting down 500 words or 2000, maybe 15 minutes or two hours, editing one page or ten chapters, but I was writing. Because again, say it with me: I was in the habit. My brain knew, when I sat down at my computer, that I didn’t have time to mess around. Either the words flowed or I forced them out, but either way, there were words.
What got me back into productive writing? How did I get over the hump? You often hear that it takes 21 days to build a new habit, though of course there’s no set duration. I fell back on some of the tricks that I’d been using back when I was in the writing habit, consciously or unconsciously. I picked a theme song and played it at the beginning of every writing session. I picked a particular writing snack. I picked a new writing spot in my new house where I would only write fiction, not all the other writing I do. I deliberately rebuilt the habit with a bundle of circumstances around it that would remind me of all the productive writing I’d done in the past. That helped break some of the bad habits I’d developed (e.g. checking Twitter “real quick”) that had pushed productive writing to the wayside.
So as you start this new calendar year, ask yourself if you like the habits you’ve developed. If you like them, keep them; if you don’t, why not make a change?
Q: What are your best tips and tricks for building a new habit, writing or otherwise?
Raised in the Midwest, Greer Macallister earned her MFA in creative writing from American University. Her historical novels have been named Book of the Month, Indie Next, LibraryReads, Target Book Club, and Amazon Best Book of the Month picks and optioned for film and television. Her latest novel, The Thirteenth Husband, is inspired by Aimee Crocker, the Paris Hilton of the Gilded Age. Macallister also writes the ongoing Five Queendoms epic fantasy series as G.R. Macallister. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Boston, MA. www.greermacallister.com
Happy new year, Greer! A new tactic I’m trying this year… (and it worked pretty well for me in December!)…five writing sprints a day, 30 mins each. So, in the morning, I make five little boxes and then I set my alarm for 30 minutes each time. It’s so fun checking off a box, and I’ve been thrilled with the work I can get done in this combined 2.5 hours each day. It feels “race against the clock” and is oddly productive!
Wishing you a wonderful 2023!
I love this approach, Sarah, and plan to try it. Thanks for sharing!
As a homemaker, I used to try to finish my housework and errands before writing. But I found myself too tired and mentally fragmented to write after housework. So I began prioritizing my writing. If I wake up early–say, 4 a.m.–I go to my office and write until it’s time to fix breakfast. It’s been a lot harder this year, because my husband and I have also moved, like you did. Only my husband chose to have the house renovated WHILE WE WERE STILL LIVING IN IT AND WERE PACKING! So I did not get much writing done. However, whenever I was alone on the road, I would think about the characters in my new book. I’d imagine their personalities, how they would interact with others, what their goals were, and about the plot. Then I’d talk about it with my mother-in-law, who is a terrific friend. That made the story real to me and has provided some feed-back. This has helped tremendously and has saved much rewriting.
This is such an underrated approach — “writing” as thinking about characters and feeling out their boundaries, etc. Mentally engaging with the work every day is key for me to stay in the zone, when I’m in the zone. Write on, Sheri!
A daily habit (or bunch of habits) used to be the ticket for me, too, Greer, and I’ve fallen away from that approach. Good to have this reminder, thanks.
I’ve resolved to resolve more in 2023 — to finish more things, clear the path for myself mentally to dive into a creative headspace, and to generally not put off until tomorrow what I can do today.
Happy New Year!
There’s a lot to be said for daily habits, for sure! I pushed through doing a lot of writing and production work last year while my cataract worsened. Wrong choice. I needed to take a two month break post-surgery just to recover from burnout, because I did not realize the degree to which the effort it took to keep plugging along with blurry vision wiped me out.
Things are better now, but I’m finding the need to reconstruct the patterns I used to depend on to get writing done. It’s all coming back–just slowly. One thing that I think helps is that I created a drafting and publication schedule (I am hybrid–short stories in tradpub, books in selfpub) which breaks up my planned work, both serial and nonserial work, into manageable chunks. Instead of having the “OH NO TOO MUCH TO DO WHERE DO I START” overload, I can now look at my to-dos and they’re broken out into something I can wrap my brain around without panicking or falling into paralysis because I don’t know which of all the things I need to be working on.
Good post, Greer, and great timing. Twenty-one days is a workable timeline to build a new habit. It gives me a deadline and helps me pick my goals for each day/week. Thanks and blessings to you for 2023!
Great post, Greer, and happy New Year! I’m completely out of my comfort zone right now but the first thing I did Jan 1st was to write in my catch-all notebook. It was midnight, the sky lit up with fireworks. I loved it. We are our habits.
Happy New Year everyone! I love the tips and will incorporate some of them.
In 2022, my husband, dog and I moved from the U.S. to Australia, which delayed my writing, but I managed to find an online writing “accountability” group that kept me on track to meet some milestones that I’m overall happy with. On January 1st, 2023, I ran/walked a hot, hilly 5k, which was tortuous but left me exhilarated and feeling that I had started the year off with purpose.
I have some writing and publishing goals to reach this year, which I hope the online group and personal deadlines will allow me to reach. But I have two overarching mantras this year: Dream Bigger, and Does it Serve Me? I’m well into many people’s retirement age group, but I have no intention of slowing down.
The writers group I belong to (Michigan Romance Writers) has sessions on Zoom we call write-ins. We meet regularly (daily this month) and write for about a three hour segment, meeting at the top of the hour to report our success or lack of. It also works for brainstorming or just hashing out a writing problem with someone who understands. Some of us are published, others still working toward that goal. We started this during the Covid lockdowns, and it has been a great inspiration for many to keep writing. It serves to keep us accountable but also makes the whole writing process less lonely.