Five Writing Habits to Cultivate

Not Even One of Them About Writing Good Subtitles

Good morning to everyone out there reading except Tim, who knows perfectly well why.

June wanes. I hope you are prepared for the month of July, which begins later this week. July contains, among other important events, my birthday. Be ready. If you’re not local you may not realize, but in some parts of Maryland they celebrate the entire week.

Here’s the three-point lowdown on habits:

1. Old habits die hard. (idiom)

2. Everything is hard before it is easy. (Goethe)

3. Every day, it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. (jogging baboon from Bojack Horseman)

I’ve written before about the importance of good habits to overall productivity. If you are interested in a refresher, the most germane articles are Little Habit Tracker That Could, about how to build habits over time; and Choosing to Be a Great Writer, on the action items you can undertake to improve your writing game. It’s great to do the things from that latter article as often as you can, but what’s really realistic? How much can one person reasonably do?

As I discussed in “Habit Tracker,” if you try to pack too many habits into your life, or set your success metric too high for any one habit (or any combination of individual habits), then you run the risk of overwhelming yourself and giving up. That’s the opposite of what you want. When, today, herein, I suggest five writing habits to cultivate, I don’t mean that you should immediately (or ever) set out to build all five. 

What I do suggest, in addition to the obvious—write as much as you can, read as much as you can, and study craft as much as you can—is to consider the below as helpful add-on habits to enrich what you’re already doing in your writing life. Or, if you’re just getting your writing life off the ground, one or a few of these might be good starter habits to get you in the swing of it. 

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

1. Consider how much you’re already doing;

2. Figure out how much more you’d like to incorporate;

3. Read “Habit Tracker” for tips on forming and maintaining new habits;

4. Pick your poison, below.

Tackle a Prompt

If you’re already nailing your goal of writing every day—or on another regular schedule—and you want to push the envelope a bit further, then consider making a habit of tackling a writing prompt on a regular basis—once a week, once a month, whatever.

Writing prompts are a great addition to your writer's “gymnasium”—the collection of stuff you use to strengthen your writing muscles. Most of us write mostly what we’re interested in or passionate about. You’re supposed to write what you know, right? And if you were trying to write about something that didn’t interest you, you would have no motivation. That’s the writing we do most of the time and it makes perfect sense why.

When you take on a writing prompt, you’re getting the germ of the idea from somewhere outside yourself. That writing will work your creative muscles in a different way than writing an idea that came from within, especially one you’ve been turning over in your mind for a while. You can take this a step further by committing, ahead of time, to choose your prompt from a set of conditions and stick with it, instead of scrolling for a prompt that jumps out at you.

So where can you get writing prompts? No need to spend money, I’ve got you covered.

• The writing coach and owner my cool friend at RE:Written puts a fresh prompt on her Facebook page each Wednesday.

• Ideas spring eternal at r/WritingPrompts, where you can filter by flair from the righthand column.

• This plot generator at Reedsy has more than 1 million possible combinations with plenty of detail if you need guidance. 

If you don’t have access to the internet or just don’t like using it (Hey, Joe!), a great place to get writing prompts is from books of photographs. Not your own photo albums, but famous or impactful photos. I used to participate in a writing group where we’d spend the first ten or fifteen minutes writing to a prompt. Our lovely hostess would bring out a big book of glossy photos, flip to a random page, and we’d then have to look at the picture and write a story based on what we saw. This is plenty easy to do with just a book of photos and a pen and paper, with nary a bar of wifi signal in sight.

Morning Pages

Morning pages are a concept developed by Julia Cameron, someone who is creatively prolific herself but who I know primarily as someone who helps others with techniques to be more creative. Chief among the techniques, morning pages. A simple explanation, directly from Cameron’s website: 

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning.

The pure idea is that you get up in the morning and spend fifteen or thirty minutes writing in a notebook or journal before you do anything else. Other key tenets include not overthinking the morning pages—just write anything that comes into your head, they’re not supposed to be your writing writing!—and don’t show them to anyone, ever—morning pages are just yours and not for anyone else’s eyes.

The activity is intended to clear out your mind, flush everything from the previous day and any dreams out of your head so you can start totally fresh. It also puts you into a creative mindset for the rest of the day. All kinds of artists can benefit from this exercise, not just writers. Anyone, probably. (But I suspect everyone is an artist of some kind.)

Personally, following the letter of the morning pages law didn’t work for me. I’m not great at doing anything in the morning except turning off my alarm clock without waking up. If that sounds familiar, good news—morning pages can just as easily be evening pages. Clear your head out from the day behind you and get to sleep more easily. Get your brain in a creative mode before you go to sleep and let your brain tell you fun stories all night. You’ll be thinking creative thoughts while you are falling asleep.

The way I employ this is fairly far from Cameron’s original intent. As I’ve mentioned before, my variation on morning pages is this: I fill one or two notebook pages (B6 size) with longhand writing, typically in bullet list form, on a topic relevant to one of my creative projects. Right now I’m tightening up plot and worldbuilding for a major writing project so I pick a detail from that project each evening and just write a page or two about it—“Why does this character act like that?” “Do these people practice astrology? Take it seriously? What’s their zodiac like?” “What kind of hairstyles are acceptable for women and what’s the sociocultural tax for deviating?” 

In this process I always generate at least one additional question, which I reserve as the heading for the next day’s page. That way, I’m thinking about my next topic and generating ideas as I go to bed; my brain is working on those thoughts overnight; and I stay motivated to do another page or two tomorrow.

Read Just a Bit

Read every day, obviously, right? Writers learn by studying and writing, which is done (in part) by reading. We’re so lucky that our study of writing just happens to be one of the most enjoyable activities there is. Naturally writers should be reading as much as they can and, as I’ve said before, trying to read widely. If you’ve already got that locked down, then the next step is to spend a little time each day—even just a tiny bit—reading about the craft of writing. 

Pick up a book on craft that you’ve always wanted to read or the nearest one or the one that’s on sale right now. Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward is only $5.95 for e-readers. Just read a few paragraphs each day. Ten minutes or less. 

This kind of reading doesn’t tax my brain the way reading fiction does. When I read fiction I’m focusing on absorbing so many elements at once: The basic stuff like the plot, setting, and characters; the literary stuff like mood, voice, and context; the writerly stuff, by which I mean I’m paying extra close attention to how the author I’m reading does whatever it is I know I need to get better at. Narrative nonfiction is just as taxing for me, as I’m trying to absorb a story but also usually feeling bored and fighting to stay on task because I just don’t enjoy nonfiction very much.

But expository writing is easy to digest. It’s not that I have nothing to learn from good expository writing, obviously I do, or else Tim would be more diligent about reading Shelf Life, right Tim? There’s usually less going on beneath the surface that I have to actively mine the text to understand. Reading to ingest information is, after all, the most basic and simplest method of reading. I can read just a bit, a few paragraphs, absorb the information, and then move on to something else.  

As opposed to my morning pages, which I do at night, reading on craft is something I like to do in the morning. That’s probably why I schedule Shelf Life to go out at 9am sharp every single time without fail. Morning is a great time to read some expository writing to learn something new or learn a new way of looking at something you already (think you) know. If you read about the craft of writing and storytelling in the morning, you’ll be primed to think about it all day, each time you pick up a pen or set your fingertips to keyboard. 

If you’re interested in a list of my faves I will make you one in a future article—just let me know in the comments.

Ideate for Ideation’s Sake

I would never, not in a million, bazillion years, call any of my readers an idiot. I’m just pointing that out so you understand why I have forgone the many puns this subhead could have utilized.

A great and super easy way to get yourself into a consistently creative mindset is to habitually generate new ideas for writing projects. If it doesn’t sound “super easy,” may I remind you that I did not specify good ideas. Low-effort ideas are welcome—nay, encouraged—for this purpose. 

Challenge yourself to come up with a new story idea on some regular, frequent basis. You don’t have to flesh it out or develop it, just come up with it. Just a phrase or sentence that captures the story idea or even just the foundation of one, for instance: “A floating hospital ship, but in space.” Ideas can come from all kinds of places, but if you find it difficult to generate new ones here are a few places to start so you can fake it till you make it:

1. Pick a famous classic and change stuff around. Shakespeare play but the lead couple is queer and it’s set in a small-town community theatre club. Moby Dick but retold as a fantasy story. Gilgamesh and Enkidu but they’re both women, no, wait, that’s already Xena: Warrior Princess.

2. Try out this plot-twist generator. It’ll give you up to ten completely random plot twists to choose from, so all you have to do is come up with the story that leads up to the twist.

3. Ask a wild “what-if” question. If you didn’t read comics as a kid you may be unfamiliar with Marvel Comics’ What If? Series (they’re making a show now) but each issue would explore a few different scenarios by looking at a key moment in Marvel history and exploring how the timeline would have unfolded if something had happened just a little differently. Pick any moment in history and ask yourself how things might be today, or in the future, with one key detail changed.

Learn a New Word

In my junior year high school English class, Ms Greene instructed us all to keep a list of words from our assigned reading that we didn’t know and had to look up, along with a dictionary definition of the word. We had to provide at least five for every text we read. Now, at sixteen I did not know every word; I still don’t. But I definitely knew all the words in The Crucible and Madame Bovary. With a dearth of genuinely unknown words before me, I just turned in a list of the longest words and called it a day.

Most of us come across words we truly don’t know with varying levels of frequency, but adult native speakers of English are probably unlikely to come across too many new words in everyday life. That’s okay. I don’t mean that for this habit you have to seek out a brand-new, never-heard-it-before word and find out its dictionary definition.

Instead, seek out a word that you don’t know well and do a deep dive into its shades of meaning and esteemed history. Any word you enjoy saying or hearing and would like to know more about. 

• Read up on its etymology. 

• Look into how it may be used differently by other social or cultural groups who use the same language.

• Learn its variant meanings, if it has any.

• Find out all the different parts of speech it can manifest as.

For instance, I learned fairly recently that the word bellwether doesn’t have, at all, the origin I thought it did. I knew, correctly, that a bellwether is an early indicator of a coming change, but I thought it had its origin in the same neighborhood as weathervane, that it referred to some kind of device that showed which way the wind was blowing. It actually refers to a wether, or a castrated ram. The bellwether is the leader of his flock of sheep; the other sheep follow where he goes. The shepherd puts a bell on that particular individual, so that wherever he goes the shepherd can quickly find the whole flock by the sound of the bell. This is the same origin as the term bell cow, used in American football to indicate a team’s lead running back. The term lead dog (which refers to dog sledding) is also related.

If you take a few minutes on a regular basis to really get to know a cool or interesting word in depth, I guarantee you’ll discover something before long that you will put to good use in your writing. Seriously, come back and tell me if you don’t. I’ll give you back the time you spent reading today.

On an unrelated note, I finally remembered the thing I was going to ask you, which was, would you fill out a poll? I mean I was going to just put a poll here but nobody fills those out. And I’m not going to make a poll to poll you about whether you’d fill out a poll. I’m still debating whether to make a poll. Perhaps Thursday. Adieu to June!

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If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.

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After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.