What can count as daily writing?
I've attempted to keep up with a daily writing streak several times before—like many others here, I'm sure. These streaks ended when I finished a chapter or essay, when I got stuck on projects without an outline, because life got in the way... There are a million scenarios that conspire against people maintaining a streak, and all it takes is one to start a chain of feeling like a failure.
Writing for an hour a day or writing 300+ words a day or whatever else sounds doable in theory. But in practice, it's not sustainable for most. The bar has to be lower. Or nonexistent. One of my friends has been drawing every single day since 2016, and on tight or low-energy days, she simply doodles or tinkers with a WIP for a couple of minutes. Exercising your writing muscles and keeping your brain sharp is never a bad idea. But a surgeon that doesn't perform surgery every single day is still a surgeon, and a football player who doesn't play every single day is still a football player.
Yes, I do believe that there is such a thing as too much research, too much daydreaming, too much of anything that persistently enables procrastination. If getting a project closer to its tangible finish line is a continuous problem, then it's time for me to get honest with myself and maybe supplement my daily writing goal with a weekly or monthly goal. Writing 1,000 a week can yield a novella in just one year, or you can reach a full-length novel in the same timeframe with just 1,250-1,500 words a week.
So, what can count as daily writing?
- Writing one (1) word
- Writing one (1) sentence
- Wordsmithing/polishing one (1) previously written word
- Writing a logline
- Writing a premise line
- Rereading your own work (and maybe editing along the way)
- Reading someone else's work while keeping your own work in mind
- Brainstorming—even if it's just in your head
- Mind mapping
- Proofreading
- Writing a haiku
- Cutting words from a draft
- Having a conversation about writing in general, your characters, etc with someone
- Writing scene cards
- Setting a timer for 5 minutes and writing whatever comes to mind
- Shuffle a playlist and write for the duration of 1 or more songs
- Copying a favorite poem or passage by hand to study it
- Creating cover art
- Brainstorming essay/chapter/book/etc titles
- Creating a timeline for your the events in your novel
- Daydreaming about your project
- Writing a synopsis
- Restructuring or reordering sentences
- Doodling your character
- Outlining
- Organizing notes
- Journaling
- Researching
- Formatting your draft
- Developing a character profile
- Writing 1 or more bullet points to turn into proper prose later
I'm sure there's more, and I'm sure these don't work for everyone. These all certainly don't work for me 100% of the time. But even when life gets in the way, I can trust that my brain is incubating ideas and digesting information and doing all the other amazing things brains do to help us create things that mean something to us. Ignoring my creations time and time again is a greater disservice to myself than a week or month of not achieving what many writers unnecessarily try to use to justify their identity as a writer—high word counts.