Habits for daily writing

2025-04-14 · About 10 minutes long

Context

I wrote this piece—like, let’s see, gosh where did I put it… ah yes here it is—on 2022-11-26. That’s 870 days ago. For the non-walking calculators (non-calculating walkers?) among us, that’s 2 years 4 months ago.

I lived in Brazil for 2 years. In Rio Grande do Sul, what a wonderful beautiful place! Living in Brazil was a great experience, perhaps a story for another time. (One day I’ll publish that piece, I promise.) I would go into more detail about why I was in Brazil, of all places, but this blog is on the public internet, etc. (who knows who is reading this). So, until I figure out exactly what to write about Brazil, apologies for the omission.

I wrote a lot while I lived in Brazil. I think, over the course of 2 years, I wrote 300k+ words a lot (as of the last time I counted). Mainly short-form essays (like the one that follows this big context block)! The process of writing 300k words over the course of 2 years was in actuality quite interesting (or so I tell myself): In short, I kept a document called Questions that I added to whenever an interesting idea came to mind. Each morning, I would spend about 30 minutes to an hour trying to write “an answer” to the most interesting question (Which worked out to about 500 words per answer, give or take, though usually over 1,000. I often went over, ha.) That’s not all there is to it; I also wrote lengthy specifications for not one but two (!) new programming languages, ilk and affetto (Those two darlings will one day see the light of day, I promise), as well as a weekly newsletter for friends and family about my adventures.

The essay that follows is an answer to one of the first Questions I recorded. It was (let me check, ah here), “how can I build habits to write consistently?” At the time, I knew I wanted to write daily, to write about interesting and personal ideas. I also had never been a consistent writer; I wasn’t sure what the process should look like, what my goal in writing so frequently should be, and whether writing daily was something worth trying to do. (As opposed to, e.g., keeping a better journal.)

So in answering the question, I learned quite a lot. The word essay comes from the French “to try” (that’s English, no fair!). Trying is what writing is: a tool for thinking, a tool through which to try. Through writing, you make your fuzzy ideas real; they’re ugly, but they’re real, and concrete, and you can work on them and shape them until they’re better, digestible, and match the picture you were holding in your mind this whole time, which picture has now immeasurably shifted as the concreteness of the words on the page permeate your mental model of the subject, causing a temporary convergence of clarity and symmetry which provide the focus you need to figure out what “to try” to think about next. Wow. That was winded. I digress.

By writing the essay that follows, I was able to adopt quite a lot of the principles I outlined, and I begun writing daily. Above all else, the essay that follows was the spark that helped me improve drastically as a writer. This experiment, that of writing daily and maintaining a Questions document to do so, was worth it! I would do it again.

Which brings me to today. I want to do it again! I really want to start writing again. I want to get my ideas out there. I’m sitting on 300k words of original thought, and it is killing me to watch the window of relevance slip past me. I want to build habits to write consistently again. More than that, to publish consistently.

Below is the answer to the question, in full. I hope you enjoy it. In re-reading my past self’s answer, I hope to start writing daily, once again. It’s quite a lot; We’re headed into final season here at MIT, I have to wake up early tomorrow, and I have a midterm on Wednesday, but I think I can handle it.

Starting today, I hope to gradually publish the pieces I have written, starting with those I wrote over the course of my time in Brazil. I also hope to include new pieces that contextualize what I’ve written and more fully explore ideas briefly outlined.

This piece is nothing special. It’s more of an exercise in writing, a first stroke to build momemtum. Enjoy.

Question: How can I build habits to write consistently?

2022-11-26 · Isaac Clayton

The pair of skills that will have the greatest impact on your ability to communicate complex ideas are, above all else, the skills of thinking critically and writing effectively. If there’s anything we learn from our education, let it be this, as the application of these skills will carry you through much of our professional life. Volumes have been written about the merits of these two skills; I do not want to repeat that argument here.

Instead, I would like to explicitly focus on building the skill of effective writing. Writing is the point at which the suspended structure of thoughts we hold in our mind become ink on a page: as writers, we must learn how to cross this boundary as seamlessly as possible. Our goal, after all, is to recreate our pattern of thought in the reader’s mind—keeping her engaged—lest her eyes wander off the page and the unfinished structure we are transmitting collapses under its own weight.

As writers, we have a difficult task: we must learn how to break down and ship structures of thought across the boundary of our mind, such that they can be reassembled incrementally, each sentence standing on its own. Much ink has been spilled on techniques for casting ideas in stone (‘On Writing Well’ by Zensser comes to mind); this is not that essay.

Learning to write well comes with time. There is no single trick, or bag of tricks, that can substitute for content, clarity, or style. Like anything else in life, to truly get better at writing, you must practice. And to practice writing, you must write consistently. That is the theme of this essay today (betrayed by the title, I suppose): How can we, as writers, build habits to write consistently?

I would like to take a second to focus on the first part of that question, the question of building habits. Habits are, after all, an action we perform habitually; without much thought to whether we do it or not. Building habits is very, very hard: after all, they’re not usually something we think about. To build a habit, we need to change the way we think. Building habits requires changing patterns of thought.

If our goal is to write effectively, we know that there is no better substitute for improvement than practice: consistent, daily writing. While a realistic, concrete goal, it’s one that seems to be awfully hard to attain in practice. (At least for me, that is: although I write a lot, I rarely finish a single piece daily). So what’s holding us back?

Habits are centered around patterns of thought. It’s an age-old adage that desires become thoughts, thoughts become actions, and actions, well, become habits. We all have the desire to become better writers. If your eyes haven’t yet wandered off the page by this point, you’re probably the type to spend a lot of time thinking about writing. Despite that, we don’t actually write as often as we want. So what patterns of thought are preventing us from performing the action of writing daily?

For me, at least, the days when I do not write are days when I excused myself from the task. When confronted with the thought of, “hey, you have the goal of learning to write effectively, why don’t you write something right now?” my mind has no shortage of answers and excuses. Exposing a few of the more common candidates, my mind often automatically replies:

“I don’t have any time today, but I’ll write tomorrow.”

Or:

“That sounds great, but I’m all out of great ideas. Maybe we can read about Tropical Semirings to get some ideas!”

(Followed by a distinct lack of writing about Tropical Semirings). Or:

“I never finish anything. Why bother starting something new? Maybe we can add to that 50-page essay outline we’ve been working on for months.”

(Spoiler Alert: that essay is a black hole of time and attention, and will never be finished.)

In our quest to become masterful writers, such responses are often discouraging. Well-intended or not, they direct mental energy away from the task at hand, which is writing. So when we’re prompted to write about something, there’s no excuse: Just Frickin’ Write!

In the interest of building the habit of writing by changing patterns of thought, instead of being disheartened when destructive responses pop into our minds, we must redirect our train of thought back on track. Confronted with our above instinctive responses, we can instead chime back:

“Even though we’re really busy today, we still have enough time to write a little.”

Or:

“Let’s start writing a little about Tropical Semirings first; we’ll start generating questions to write about in no time.”

(Note that our responses always redirect towards the actual action of writing.) Or:

“How about instead, we write something small, no bigger than 200 words, and actually finish it? If you still want to work on the essay, we can quickly prune it into something smaller, then trim off a branch we can easily finish today.”

Our goal here is not to prolong our mental exchange. Our goal is to start writing. Despite our best efforts, our wills are weak and context-dependent. Every second we spend locked in mental conflict—instead of putting ink on page—is a second we leave ourselves open to attacks from other distractions. We will lose the battle, unless our pen physically hits the page, and words start flowing. The pen is your most powerful weapon, even mightier than the sharp sword of reason, so use it!

In our quest to communicate complex ideas with others, there are no greater companions than those of critical thought and effective writing. To become better at writing, we must practice: consistently writing daily. Practice, of course, is a habit, and habits are hard to build. We must attack the problem at the root: to build the habit of writing, just start writing. Dissuading and distracting thoughts may pop up, trying to pull you away from starting your work. Do not try to reason with them: in doing so you’ll rationalize them into reasons to not write. Instead, direct any wayward energy into the page: once you start writing, your mind will shift gears, and it’ll be much easier to sustain your ability to stay concentrated.

I write this essay as the first step in my journey to become a better writer and thinker. I finally confronted the issue, thought about what has worked for me in the past, and made a plan of action going forward. If you are reading this someday, it is because the advice to myself contained herein worked well enough for me to develop the habit of consistent daily writing. In future essays I hope to document my system, my process, and how it evolves over time. With my goal for finishing something today met, however, that is a topic I must save for tomorrow.

So what are you waiting for? Just write!