The power of consistency is a greatly undervalued skill in the productivity and self-improvement space.
Most of the time writers are told how to do more with less time, where they should be focused on being consistent and showing up every day.
Build Your Library
Being consistent is the best way to build your library of work as quick as possible.
For some people, it takes five to ten years to publish a book whereas you have legends like Stephen King pumping out something like two books a year or something crazy like that.
This achievement is not by accident.
King and others like him are consistent.
They show up every day and add to their library, they put words on the page and stories into the world.
By doing so they show the world that they can create quality content, not by the inherent talent of the writer but rather as a product of showing up every day.
They focus on quantity first and quality will come with time.
Quantity vs Quality
No matter what you are learning, you’re gonna be horrible at it.
That’s just how it is.
You’re terrible because obviously you’ve never done the thing before, and that terrible writing you do when you start writing will fade with time.
This is why you need to focus on the amount of content you make not the quality in the beginning.
The more you focus on consistency the less you focus on the quantity and vice versa.
To get good at writing you have to write.
Let me repeat that, to get good at writing you HAVE to write.
You’re not gonna be a better writer by planning and planning what you will write, you will not get better thinking about the stories you’ll write.
You get better by putting words on the page.
This means the more words you put on the page the better you will get at writing.
Therefore, it only makes sense to focus on creating and writing LOTS because you will get better at writing through your output. You will learn and you will adapt.
You CANNOT have the same sort of progress working on one project for multiple years before you even let someone look at it.
The benefit just isn’t there.
Focus on quantity NOT quality when you start writing.
Momentum is EVERYTHING
Newton’s second law of motion describes the force exerted on an object as equal to the mass of the object times by the acceleration of the exerted force.
It looks pretty tricky but it’s not that bad.
Basically, the amount of energy needed to move an object depends on how heavy the object is multiplied by the speed at which energy is given to it.
This is a valuable way of looking at momentum in writing.
Initially, when you start writing the speed at which you can progress in your writing journey is very high because the large path ahead of you equates to a large mass that needs a lot of exerted energy to move it anywhere.
However, when you repeatedly come back to your writing, not only are you shrinking the amount of writing you need to progress but also it becomes easier to accelerate/ kick into gear when writing because less force is needed to push the object the same distance.
This happens because of momentum. The speed at which an object is traveling needs a large force to stop it. The more you write, the more you engage in consistency, the more momentum you gain.
Soon, you’ll be unstoppable.
You Already Know How to Achieve Success as a Writer;
- I Wrote Every Day on Medium for 100 days. Here’s What I Learned
- The Subtle Power of Unseen Horror
- Believable Worldbuilding: Tips for Crafting Fictional Worlds
- Exploration Through Writing: How to Express Yourself Writing
- The Art of Subtext: Creating Meaning Through the Hidden
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