Writing Through the Holidays

It’s hard enough to stay motivated to keep working on your novel during normal times. When the holiday season rolls around, it’s even harder. How do you stay on the writing wagon through the holidays, so you don’t lose momentum?

The first step is to make sure you actually have momentum to begin with. I’ve blogged before about the importance of creating a writing habit, where you write on a regular schedule. But it’s hard to build a writing habit. 

Writing itself is hard. Creating a writing habit is even harder. But there’s a secret trick I learned a long time ago for creating a habit, and that same trick helps you maintain through the holidays. It’s called…

“Ridiculously Easy”

If you want to create a habit, start out ridiculously easy. As an example, suppose you wanted to create a habit of working out every day. First write down what your ultimate goal is. Maybe you write “I want to do 50 pushups every day.” Then set a time every day when you’re going to work out, maybe 4 PM. Create an alarm on your phone for 4 PM, with the notation “Do pushups.”

Then on the first day, when your alarm goes off, DO NOT do 50 pushups. 

Just do 1. 

That’s right, one measly pushup on your first day. And repeat that for the entire first week. Don’t cheat and do more!

It sounds stupid. It sounds like this couldn’t possibly do you any good. And it’s true that doing 1 pushup is probably not going to stretch you physically very much. But the action of working out every day for a week will start to build mental muscle memory. You’re training your neurons to think differently about yourself. 

After a solid week of doing 1 pushup every day, bump that up to 2 pushups. And continue that for another week. By the end of two weeks, your mental muscle memory will be a bit stronger. You are now officially half a month in on your workout routine. It’s becoming a regular part of your life. It’s what you do. You are now officially Someone Who Works Out Every Day. 

After two weeks, if 2 pushups is easy, increase it to 3. But keep it ridiculously easy for several weeks more. Make it so easy that you’re actually embarrassed because it’s “too easy.” That’s the point. During the habit-forming process, you want to be looking forward to it and longing to do more. You are building a mindset that “I can’t wait for my workout every day.”

Over a few months, you can ramp things up to the point where you start to stress yourself physically. At this point, your habit is created, and it’s a very positive habit. You look forward to it. You wish you could do it more often. You actually like working out. Building that habit is very hard mental work. That’s why you keep the physical part easy, until the habit is fully built. 

Your Writing Habit

You can build a writing habit exactly the same way. Write down your ultimate goal. It might be “I want to work on my novel for an honest hour every day, five days per week.” Then set a time every day when you’re going to write. Create a daily alarm on your phone to remind you at the appointed time. 

Then when the alarm goes off, work on your novel for exactly 1 minute. No more than that. Seriously. Just 1 minute. And do that for a week. Again, you want this to be so embarrassingly easy that you could do it in your sleep. And over the course of that week, your brain will start playing wicked tricks on you. It’ll start bringing up ideas for your novel while you’re in the shower. Or driving. Or mashing the potatoes. These are the traditional times when all good ideas come to authors or scientists or any other creative types of people. 

But discipline yourself. You must be firm. You are not allowed to work more than your allotted time, no matter how much you want to.

See what that does? It starts to drive you crazy. You start to REALLY want to write. The idea of procrastinating during your one precious minute per day is now laughable. You can’t afford to waste a second, because as soon as your minute is up, you have to stop. Be strong and STOP WRITING when your time is up. I mean it! Build your habit slowly.

Then after a week, you can open the floodgates. Now you are allowed to write for a whole 5 minutes per day, but not one second more. 

Ramp up like that over a month or two, and you’ll discover yourself with a writing habit that won’t quit. You’ll wake up at 3 AM with ideas that you dictate into your phone so you won’t lose them. 

When The Holidays Roll Around

 So let’s assume you’ve built yourself a writing habit, and now it’s that time of year again. The holidays are coming. Relatives start popping in and out. Parties start happening. There may be shopping to do, meals to make, guests to entertain. 

And you’re terrified that your carefully cultivated writing habit is going to disappear, just like it did last year. So what do you do? How do you prevent that? 

Be proactive. Set a date when your Holiday Hiatus officially begins. On that date, you can still write. But you only get 1 minute per day. Just one minute, and then you absolutely positively must stop. No cheating. No writing for 2 minutes. You must be firm. 1 minute per day. 

Until the Holiday Hiatus is over. 

What does this do?

It maintains your writing habit. Your pace has slowed down, sure. But your habit is alive and hungry and screaming to be let loose again. 

Once your Holiday Hiatus is over, ramp up again. If your habit has a long history of many months, then ramp up fast. Do 5 minutes for a few days, then 10 for a few, and keep going until you’re back to your regular schedule. If your habit is less firmly grounded, then ramp up slower. 

Do this and you’ll never fall off the wagon. The wagon will slow down, and that’s OK. Because you’ll never fall off, so you’ll never have to go through the pain of getting back on again.