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How Setting Time Aside to Write is the Best Way to Help Yourself
The benefits dedicating time for writing has on improving your writing ability
Improving one’s writing is extremely difficult. Other than long, arduous periods of writing practice, the only other way to improve is to spend long periods reading, be it about tips and tricks by renowned writers or on articles of similar topics. As such, many claim that they are too busy to spare the time to improve themselves (“Oh, writing is like a hobby I do on the side, I don’t think I should have to spend so much time on it”). I used to be like that as well. Other than writing for my blog, I loathed spending swaths of time to write, especially if it meant reducing the amount of time I had to watch dramas or to play my games. (I was younger then and my priorities were finishing the latest game or watching dramas everyone was watching.) As I started to write for Medium and fell out of a consistent posting schedule, the amount of time I spent writing fell even lower (although I did spend more time on writing poems I liked).
The low-productivity writing periods continued until I attempted NaNoWriMo in November. It was then I challenged myself to do lots of writing daily. Yet, the high intensity and high output writing process I ended up with left many articles that were in dire need of editing and did not showcase any improvements. Instead, the quality started to drop as I rushed to meet my deadlines. After November, I went overseas and after I came back, I started to put off writing and editing because “I’ve written too much for the year”.
So… write too little and I don’t improve. Write too much and I don’t improve either… weird. Then came the new year. On my new year’s resolution, I promised to write for 2–3 hours daily. For the first 3 weeks of January, I was relatively freer and as a result, I could commit to my resolution. In that short 3 weeks of 2–3 hours of daily writing, I managed to complete more writing (that I’m proud of) than I ever did. I also found that writing became easier and it was easier for me to get into the mood.
After spending some time to study and streamline my writing process, here are some lessons I learned that might help everyone write better:
