Eamon WritesEamon Writes

By Eamon Storer

Writing

4 Simple Steps to Creating a Writing Habit – Atomic Habits

By Eamon on

Recently I’ve been going over my old self-improvement books and I have delved back into Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the best books on habit formation.

This book is excellent if you don’t know about it, basically Clear talks about how to create and keep habits through ‘tiny changes’ leading to ‘remarkable results’ (That’s what it says on the front cover at least).

Be sure to check it out here.

The book had me thinking.

How can I use these methods to create a consistent and reliable writing habit?

So I can write every. Single. Day.

I have compiled 4 major points from the book, that I have used, and I know will be of benefit to you if you’re looking to establish a writing habit.

Writing Habit Technique 1. Environmental Cues

The first stage that Clear talks about is that you have to ‘make the habit obvious’. This means that, if we are continually exposed to environmental triggers that remind us to write each day, we’re more likely to write.

You can make a habit obvious by having memory triggers all over your living space.

Maybe it’s a sticky note on the mirror or making sure your writing environment is clean and ready to be used.

I make my writing obvious by pairing it with a habit I already have. Clear calls this ‘habit stacking’, where the formula goes;

“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]”

So, after I go for my daily walk I know when I get back to my room, its time to write. I make it obvious as my Macbook is open and ready for me to go.

Therefore, the first technique is to make writing an obvious behavior.

Writing Habit Technique 2. Utilise Dopamine

The second stage in Atomic Habits is “Make it attractive”. This is where you want to make the act of doing the habit more enjoyable than not doing the habit.

For instance, you can pair writing with something desirable, such as telling yourself, once you write 300 words you get a piece of chocolate or you get a certain amount of time on your phone.

The goal is to pair writing with an enjoyable outcome, use the dopamine that you get from enjoyable things, and eventually associate that with the act of writing.

I do this by implementing a system I sort of workshopped called the Bottle Cap Economy, where basically I get to place a bottlecap in the reward jar, every time I write a certain amount of words, and at the end of the month I can use my caps to buy something that I want, as a treat for being productive.

The act of getting another bottle in the jar is incredibly enjoyable for me, so pick something you like to do and pair it with writing.

Thus, the second technique is to make writing as attractive as possible.

Writing Habit Technique 3. Reduce Friction

In his third stage Clear talks about how a habit needs to be easy to do consistently for a habit or a ritual to be built around it.

A writing habit can be made easy by keeping your writing apparatus out, ready to go (as discussed in Technique 1), use automated processes that lock in future behavior such as paying your friend or family member 100 dollars (or some painful sum of money) if you don’t write for the day, and finally, you can use certain techniques that reduce the pain of committing to a task.

For example, I use a technique very similar to one described in the book called The Rule of 3, whereby I commit myself to do a habit for 3 seconds, and set the bar for success so low that I’m bound to consistently achieve it. So, I commit to writing one word, just one word, that’s all I need to do for the day.

Now, I know that sounds a little pathetic but it’s just a way to get the ball rolling. Not once have I done my one word and left it at that, I’ve always kept writing.

Once you have that momentum it’s hard to stop.

Thus, the third technique is to make writing the easiest thing to do.

Writing Habit Technique 4. Satisfaction

Clear’s last Law of creating a habit is ‘Make it satisfying’. This means the habit you’re trying to build needs to provide you with motivation just through the act of completing it.

You can do this by creating a daily tracker spreadsheet on Notion or your calendar so you can visibly see each day checked off or you could give yourself an immediate reward when you complete the habit.

Anything that you feel is a reward for successfully writing will reinforce the urge for you to write.

I do this subconsciously, whereby there’s a tension in the back of my mind, that I have to write and it will become a good day, and I can do whatever I want, once I have written. This is very similar to the habit tracker described earlier.

So finally, the fourth technique is to make writing satisfying.

In Conclusion. . .

We’ve talked about 4 techniques you can use to build a writing habit, they are;

  1. Make writing an obvious behavior
  2. Make writing as attractive as possible
  3. Make writing the easiest thing to do
  4. Make writing satisfying

If you are interested in this sort of content, you can go here for a blog post I did about how to start hard things, The Rule of Three;

Boost Your Productivity: Master the ‘Power of 3’ Technique

Thank you for reading, goodbye, and good luck 🙂

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Crafting Luck: Four Easy Steps to Become a Lucky Writer

By Eamon on

The concept of luck has always been an interest of mine. I’m talking about people winning the lottery for 50 million dollars or a family of five killed in an accident. It just confounds me the concept of chance and luck. I don’t think it’s very healthy to think too deeply about it. About how much of one’s life is reliant upon luck, as you can’t change how lucky you are.

Right??

Wrong!

After doing some research on luck and what it means to be lucky, I stumbled upon a book called ‘The Luck Factor’ by Richard Wiseman. This book has definitely expanded my insight into what it means to be a ‘lucky person’ or an ‘unlucky person’.

Wiseman interviewed many people who think of themselves as lucky or unlucky people, he then compared similarities between what lucky people were doing and what unlucky people weren’t doing. He then came up with 4 guiding principles for a luckier life.

I have extracted the juice of these 4 main principles for you in this post and I will reveal to you how you can be a luckier person, specifically, a luckier writer. However, please do read Wiseman’s book, it’s really, really interesting.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Lucky Principle 1- Get Into More Chance Opportunities

Wisemen found that people who considered themselves lucky often found themselves speaking to someone, randomly, and by some chance, these people provided them with amazing opportunities that they were specifically looking for.

This means that the more connections you make with people, the higher your chances of talking to people who have opportunities for you to be a part of.

Therefore, for us to become luckier writers we need to build a web of relationships, we need to put ourselves out there.

You can do this by having discussions with people who are commenting on your writing or, as scary as it is, just talking to people in random places, such as in a queue or a shop.

Lucky Principle 2- Listen to Hunches

There’s this weird thing inside our monkey brain that knows when you are in danger or when something feels off, often referred to as a ‘gut feeling’ or a ‘hunch’ There are thousands of stories of people ignoring their gut feelings to their own detriment as well as acting on their hunches and benefiting from it.

These cues in your brain will tell you what direction you should be moving, this is key for writers.

We need to know what ideas will catch on and what ones will be left by the wayside, thus when pondering a potential story or idea listen to your internal cues and act accordingly.

Lucky Principle 3- Expect Good Things

A common theme in Wiseman’s interviews was the optimism of the lucky people and the pessimism of the unlucky people.

Especially in the spiritual part of self-improvement the power of thought is usually referred to as why individuals feel and act the way they do, it is thought that the way one thinks significantly affects how that person experiences their daily life.

Thus, if you think you’re going to have bad luck all you’ll see are the unlucky things that happen to you and thus you feel unlucky making you focus on the unlucky things in your life. This is how the unlucky people in Wiseman’s study adopted their pessimistic point of view.

Therefore, for us writers, we need to be hyper-aware of our thoughts, we need to make sure we are optimistic about our writing, we must believe we will meet our writing goals and we will achieve these lucky writing feats.

Lucky Principle 4- See the Lucky in the Unlucky

This last principle is very similar to the previous one, but this one is focused more on the willful optimism of lucky people.

Lucky people believe in themselves and that the events that happen to them always have a silver lining. This thought process obviously defaults the individual to seeing the beautiful in the ugly and is just a generally great way to go about your life.

We as writers can use this principle by noticing the things that are making us spiteful or sad and trying to see the good in them.

A great way to do this is to think about the problem and ask yourself,

“How is this the best thing that has ever happened to me?”

I have found this prompt to be an amazing reflective device.

In Conclusion…

The four applicable steps to becoming a luckier writer are;

  1. Talk to more people to maximize chance encounters
  2. Always listen to your hunches
  3. Adopt an optimistic outlook on your life and writing
  4. Ask yourself when faced with a problem “How is this the best thing that’s ever happened to me?”

Thank you for reading, don’t forget to check out The Luck Factor, and have a great day 🙂

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Overcoming Writing Block: Strategies to Reignite your Creativity

By Eamon on

What is Writing Block?

Writing Block is staring at a blank page for hours, trying with everything in you to come out with a single word but just can’t. All writers struggle with it from creative writers to journalists, it is normal. Even the most experienced writers suffer from it. J.K Rowling famously struggled with writing the later Harry Potter books.

I have just finished one of my favorite writing books to date The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Excellent book, pick one up. Pressfield talks about Resistance as a looming force over the creative stopping them from doing what they love, so basically the entity for writing block.

Understanding Writer’s Block

Ironically I started the above section on the 20th of August 2023 and I am starting this bit on the 11th of September over three weeks later. So I think I have a smidge of the idea of what this resistance entity looks like. I can only speak from my experience, but writing block looks like this;

  • Knowing you ‘should’ be writing but just shrug it off
  • Paralysed whenever you are trying to write
  • Always manage to get distracted when you mean to write
  • Say you are a writer, read writing books, reading writer’s block articles. . . . , listening to writing podcasts to trick yourself into thinking you’re doing something when in reality you haven’t written a single word on any of your projects in nearly a month

This at least is what I have experienced and I wanted to share with you some strategies I have trialed to combat this paralysis.

1. Why so serious?

I think my biggest problem is mystifying the act of writing too much making it out to be something greater than it is, I have combatted this by setting a time to write every day and just for 10 minutes I pump something out, whether that a journal entry, an idea of a creature for a horror short-story or just the words ‘I’m bored’ for the duration of the time. Eventually, I decided that enough was enough, I would write.

So don’t be so serious, it’s not your fault, Writing’s supposed to be fun, enjoy yourself

2. Use writing prompts

I have only recently started my writing journey but what gets me the most excited is writing prompts. They’re everywhere you can find them on Reddit, Pinterest, and Quora. I would recommend just searching for writing prompts scrolling through till one tickles your fancy and just right a sentence, then see if you can do one more and just keep going.

Find a prompt and see where it takes you

3. Read, watch, absorb

I have a goal to read 60 books this year I am just about halfway through and I find reading is one of if not the best ways to get inspired to write yourself. But reading is not the only way to get this also watch movies and shows as well. Even watching terrible content can be extremely motivating, I find if I watch a bad movie I am so motivated to write a better story, that it gets the writing juices flowing.

Read widely, watch movies consume terrible stories, and you’ll want to do better

In Conclusion. . .

Here are my 3 main tips to overcome writer’s block;

  • Don’t be so serious, write literally whatever
  • Find a prompt and let that generate momentum
  • Consume lots of stories

If you liked this post check out some of my others;

Fear and How to Write It

By Eamon on

It’s that feeling of having a teacher breathing down your neck while doing a test or when you hear your mum’s car get home after a long day alone, and you forgot to defrost the chicken for tea.

Fear. One of my favourite horror writers, H.P Lovecraft, put it best, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” 

What is it, and why do I love to scare the shit out of myself? I love horror. It’s my favourite genre. I don’t know what it is, but something about sitting in a dark room watching a scary movie is comforting. That sounds a bit backward, but plenty of people will watch scary movies or shocking documentaries to comfort them. In this essay, I want to figure out what is fear. And how can we use it to write better scary scenes?

The dictionary defines fear as “An unpleasant feeling triggered by the perception of danger, real or imagined” So, in this way, anything that makes us scared or creeped out must mean we deem the stimulus to endanger our well-being. However, this doesn’t make sense when you think about a creepy raggedy Anne doll in your nan’s doll collection (or some clever use of an unassuming object eliciting fear). Indeed, this response isn’t one of feeling threatened.

Francis T McAndrew, an American psychologist, conducted an excellent study titled “On the nature of creepiness,” investigating the cues that give someone “the creeps.” He describes creepiness as a “response to the ambiguity of a threat.” McAndrew discusses what he calls a “creepiness detector” as basically this thing inside humans that decides whether something is a potential threat, which, when identified as a potential threat (whether it’s a man following you around the city or a weird sound in the middle of the woods), our ‘creepiness detector’ identifies these things as a potential threat and thus we consider it creepy.

So now we understand that we get creeped out or scared when something is considered a possible threat to our well-being. I want to apply this to some of my favorite movies.

First of all, the only movie I have watched so far that gave me a mini panic attack is a Netflix movie called Incantation. I know I have not watched nearly the tip of the iceberg of scary movies; I’m merely a horror infant, do keep that in mind. This is a Taiwanese supernatural, found-footage horror movie in which a woman must save herself and her daughter from the religious curse she unleashed six years prior. The whole time is tense and quite scary, but why is this the case? Let’s apply what we have learned. Something becomes eery when we consider it a threat. This film directly talks to the viewer giving chants and hand signs for the audience to do, which we later find are not as meaningless as the main character would have us believe; where finally, at the end of the film, the audience is treated as a part of the film in which, the woman, apologizes for what she’s about to do! And then does something which is supposed to have detrimental effects on the viewer; I had a mini panic attack here as I genuinely felt I was in danger, which was excellent work from the director.

But I only sometimes want that feeling from media. It’s uncomfortable to be that scared; I want to be enthralled in the story and make an “Eeeeeeeeeegh” sound when something creepy happens. For example, in The Blair Witch Project, an American supernatural horror film, where three students decide to go into the backwoods to investigate the mystery behind the Blair Witch incidents; when unfortunately, they lose their map and sense of direction, and things take a turn for the worse. Throughout the whole film, plenty of things are creepy in just the right way. For instance, the group comes across stick figures hung on trees, and you feel a real sense of creepiness; using McAndrew’s idea of the “creepiness detector,” the group finds the stick figures after waking from their sleep; the symbols convey that there is some intentionality and malevolence which otherwise are just sticks and twine, which thus pervades a genuine creepiness.

I am writing my first short story, “Totem,” a supernatural horror, and I’m finding it hard to identify how to create that sense of unease. After learning about fear in the research of this essay, I have thought of 3 ways that you and I can write scary scenes for our stories.

  1. To make something creepy, an otherwise innocuous object or event must happen in an odd situation. We want to add hints of a larger picture and let the reader’s imagination fill in the blanks.
  2.   Ultimately, the fear generated around an out-of-place object is the fear of the unknown, which is the root of most scary events. The more obscure the link between the object and the environment, the more ambiguous the threat and the more frightening the scene.
  3.   Finally, use your fears. Everyone is scared of something, and at the base of all these things is the unknown, so if you write from a place of fear, you will instill some fear in your audience.

That’s it. I hope you have gotten something out of this; I would love to hear what you think; let me know below. Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you again.

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