10 Tips for Creating a Consistent Writing Practice in your Midlife
“A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.”
Whether you’ve never written a word in your life or you haven’t written in a long time, having a writing practice is a great way to express yourself creatively, explore thoughts and emotions through journaling, or leave your personal history for your friends, family, and posterity. And with the convenience of technology, getting your words down is easier than ever.
But consistency is the name of the game when you have writing practice, and it's mostly a mental game. After all, no one is holding you down in your sofa and clicking the NEXT EPISODE button to binge another season of Peaky Blinders. What makes writing a practice is showing up consistently, through good days and bad.
I’m a published writer with well over twenty years of experiences with blocks, streaks, highs, and lows, and so I know the things that have helped me create a successful, consistent writing practice. Here are the essentials.
10 tips for creating a consistent writing practice in your midlife
Get it down
The first tip on creating a consistent writing practice is getting into the practice of getting it down. A writer writes, plain and simple.
Everything that you’ve been thinking of or working on in your mind, get it down, regardless of how bad you think it is. That judgment right there—that it isn’t a “good” idea—is not your choice to make because you haven’t spent time working on the idea. For now, get it down.
You're training yourself to get down words instead of waiting for inspiration or until the moment is right or the words are good.
Let me get morbid for a second: you’re going to die someday. If you didn’t put it down somewhere, no one will know about your memoir, your book of poems, or your amazing sci-fi opera. They won't know how you create characters, tell intriguing stories, or describe the complex beauty of an abandoned shell found in a beach.
Above all else — get it down.
Get. It. Down.
2. Make a home base
Creating your home base is the second way to create a consistent writing practice. It consists of a place to do the writing, a time to do it, and the space to create without any disturbances.
Place
Find a room, or a corner of a room, where you can do your writing. If you have a place that you can decorate, by all means, make it inspiring. If you don’t have one yet, you can always work away from home in cafes and libraries.
My past home bases include the family’s computer room, the garage, the quiet room on the second floor of the Oak Lawn Library, the window seat at the Chicago Grind Cafe, and the corners of various apartment bedrooms.
Time
Two things here, time of day and duration. I started as a night owl and then switched over to being an early bird, which has worked out great for me (except in instances when I’m editing blog posts at four in the morning because I can’t sleep). It's all about trying different things to figure out what works for you. Just remember that it’s all about consistency so stick with it.
As far as length of duration, you can either have a word count or write for a set length of time. I tend to go with a word count because I can easily waste time for an hour if you give it to me. Plus, if you give yourself a word count, when you're done, you're done.
Space
This isn't so much a physical thing as a psychological one. You need the space away from your everyday life in order to create. In that space is quiet, peace, comfort. Bottom line: you must not be disturbed. Writers guard their space like a treasure chest of matcha lattes.
This is what I call solitude. A physical place will help you create psychological space. Also, let your loved ones know how important this space is so they can guard it with you.
3. Write Everywhere
When you’re consistent enough at your home base, take it on the road.
This is different than tip number one because this involves writing consistently somewhere else.
This will get you into the practice of being open to writing everywhere so that when you can’t write at your home base, you can still get some work done.
I’ve written consistently in libraries and coffee shops, scribbled in notebooks and on napkins. I even bought a Brother typewriter and wrote in the garage, even in the winter months, when the family computer was being used by my siblings. From this, I discovered that my home base was with me wherever I went, as long as I got into the right frame of mind to get there.
4. Take care of your body and mind
Having a consistent writing practice will be just as physical as it is mental, so take care of yourself to write better. I would invest in a desk that you can sit and stand up in. Sitting for hours a day is unnatural, and it isn't going to help your writing if you're sore for the next couple days or weeks with a bad back or sore shoulders.
Get seat cushions. Use a pomodoro timer and take your breaks stretching your legs and back. Use that microphone to talk and give your hands a break.
It goes without saying that you shouldn't be excessively indulging in drugs, alcohol, or anything else that would keep you from writing.
Yes, a lot of writers in the past indulged in those things and have written some pretty amazing things on them, but a lot of them also lived a pretty tumultuous terrible life, no?
Get your mind healthy too. Yoga, mindfulness, meditation, and/or therapy or counseling. All of these worked wonders to help me through blocks. Also: this notion of “art is my therapy” is outdated and bass akwards. Work on your mentals!
And don’t forget not to overwork. Once you really get into writing, you’ll then need to create a proper break practice as well as one for writing. So much to do!
5. Resistance is natural
If you want to write consistently, you have to acquire some self-awareness on what resists you. “What is resistance, Dave?” Glad you asked!
If writing consistently feels like a high-speed train zooming down a track, resistance are logs and bricks and stones and things in front of the wheels that slow it down. The accumulation of all those is what makes you stop, which causes a block.
Those little things in front of your wheels are our histories, mindsets, limiting beliefs, and expectations.
They look like this:
“I’m too old to begin writing.”
“I didn’t go to school for writing.”
“My writing sucks therefore I suck.”
“My third-grade English teacher said I was a terrible writer.”
Steven Pressfield talks extensively about resistance in his book, The War of Art. In it, he said that more important an action, the more resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.
The key is not to let the appearance of it stop you. It means you’re going in the right direction. Every writer feels resistance, whether you’ve been doing it for two days or two decades.
It can also come from the act of writing itself.
While working on my first novel, instead of working on a scene with my main character and his brother, I suddenly found that it was essential to write a 100,000-word backstory of a minor character—a character I eventually took out of the novel altogether!
Be aware that resistance is always around the things that matter the most to you and that it can come in different forms. Be curious about what resist you and simply work with them.
Pro tip: pay particular attention to when you're working on an important project and watch what you do instead of writing. I know I'm dealing with resistance when I suddenly start cleaning my entire apartment instead of working on my story.
6. Write from your true voice
One day, you'll finish the rough draft of your story, poem or novel, and after a break, you’ll go back to read it. Immediately, your brain will begin finding all the wrong things about it. Your heart will drop, panic will make you jump up and crawl into bed, swearing you’ll never write again.
You’ll return but this time equipped with help from videos, how-to books, or blogs like that.
Stop! I know you want to make it great but not yet.
Trust yourself first, always. Craft is something you can always put in later. In the first few drafts, spend time with it and yourself. Be patient. Trust yourself to work it out with yourself for awhile before going to an expert. Your true voice wrote the rough draft, and your true voice is your north star. Follow it!
This part isn't always fun, but it's essential. I've wasted way too many words way and too many hours reworking a piece that wasn't ready to be reworked yet. You have to learn to build a tolerance for the unknown. It's called a liminal space and it's outside of your comfort zone.
Get used to sitting with your early work and just playing around with it. Let it be messy, let it be flawed, let it be ugly. Love it for its ugliness because it's actually beautiful (wow that’s deep!).
Another way that you could ignore your true voice is putting too much pressure on trying to get published. Listen: don’t worry about that.
Later, when you feel more comfortable and you’ve nailed down your writing practice and when you feel you want to get it out there for publishing houses and reviews, then, by all means, read up on how to get published. Until then, just work on how best to write consistently and how best to bring out your true voice through your art.
Don’t ditch your instincts for some sure thing from craft books and advice, guys. Your true voice knows the way. Trust it!
“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
7. Be patient
Building a consistent writing practice is like planting a garden. It takes patience, love, care, and faith. So how insane is it for you to go out to your garden right now and scream at your seeds to grow.
That's exactly what you're doing when you get mad at yourself for not being at the place that you want to be in. It takes time to write consistently, and it takes time to write things that inspire you. It takes time to make your words work.
In other words, it takes a lot of mistakes and failures. Life will happen. Oh yes, life will happen.
Also, you’re going to suck at this at first. It’s not going to be easy. This is a practice like anything else. Writing can be a beautiful time of self-reflection of imagination and curiosity and wonder.
That’s why I mentioned earlier about true voice. When you are your true self, your love and enthusiasm and wonder and creativity just flow. It’s all this mental stuff that gets in the way—expectations, publication, “genius”, reputation, and all that.
If you want more imagination, curiosity, and wonder, get your FREE 12-page guide to charging your creative midlife battery here. It's your key to getting more battery life out of your real life and your art.
8. Get support
Maintaining a consistent writing habit that is both healthy for your mind and your body means you need to find fellow path walkers that have been there and are doing the same things you are. You can't do this alone.
Of course your loved ones, friends, and family are there for support, but what I'm talking about here is more about finding fellow writers.
The great thing about technology today is that we can connect with so many people on and off the internets. Use the Meetup app to find writing groups. Go to your local library, local café and rec center to see if there are posters up for writing groups or classes.
There are dozens of ways of getting out there and meeting people. If you live in Chicago, I HIGHLY recommend the Story Studio. I’ve taken a few classes there and they are excellent.
Speaking of local Chicago events, hi everyone reading this that went to the “Let’s Just Write! Chicago Writers Conference”!)
There's just something so warm and fuzzy about meeting people with the same challenges, dreams, loves, and goals that you have.
Support was the number one thing that I didn’t have enough of when I was writing. I took on a Me vs The World mentality, and it was draining! I hadn’t surrounded myself with enough writers in my circle to support me and keep me motivated.
9. Persevere
Consistency is showing up when you don’t feel good. Consistency is not about waiting for inspiration but writing until she appears. It isn't always going to look good. It isn't going to read good. It's going to be terrible and messy and icky and stupid and wrong.
But let me tell you a little secret—once the words are done, you won’t be able to tell what days were good and what days were bad. They’re just words after that.
Show up.
If you do quit, try again. You can always come back to it, like I did. After twenty years, I quit writing for sixteen months. It was in my midlife crisis. It was a bad, dark time in spots, and I didn't know what to do. Thankfully with the help of a therapist, I was able to see things in a new light. Now I’m back here, writing for you guys. My writing life is different than it was before. It’s matured. And I love it.
One of my favorite inspirational quotes I hung on my wall for years was an ad to quit smoking. It said, “The average smoker quits eight times before they quit for good. Keep quitting.”
Keep not quitting.
10. Fave Hun!
Have fun mixing letters and words around, like I did there in the title above. Have fun coming up with weird stupid stories and poems of your life and your vision. Be the fool!
Writers are some of the weirdest, strangest, funniest, most passionate people! What are we here for if not to play around with words and language, to bend language to its limits in order to show folly, sublimity, joy, pain, anguish, and melancholy. i.e. LIFE!
It's not how we interpret or follow tips and tricks and tools, but also how we misuse them and get them wrong for our own purposes.
Make an art form of your life!
Whether you want to write fiction or nonfiction, whether you want to start a blog or write a script for a podcast, whether you want to write to get published and make some money off of it, or simply write for your legacy, there’s a joy in this if you let it be!
There’s an indescribable elation and freedom I feel when I’m in flow. When I’m writing from that true place inside of me, I feel like I am a part of something else. I really feel God through my writing when I’m in that place.
Stripped of ego or intention or outcome or expectation, writing is a beautiful alchemy.
Think of it: you’re taking these amorphous, symbolic, nonlinear experiences and ideas from your mind and translating them into a structured, linear code for people to decipher.
AND not only do they get to experience what you've experienced, but if they connect in a certain way, they'll be able to connect with their own experience as well. How fucking cool is that!
Literature is truly one of the best art forms. It takes so much of our mind and our hearts and our spirits to use it to connect with it, to unlock it, and to enjoy it.
I wish you all the best. And I want you to keep one thing in mind: don’t let the absence of literary skill in your own writing stop you from writing consistently. It’ll come. If you work hard and be true to yourself, it’ll come.
I promise.
Bonus: Recommended Reading
Literally all of these books are falling apart in my library from my constantly rereading them. Enjoy!
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
A short but amazing book on the writing life and its enemy, Resistance.
The Writing Warrior by Laraine Herring
A more spiritual take on the battles that we fight as writers. Her feminine energy balances out Pressfield’s masculine energy.
The Modern Library Writers Workshop by Stephen Koch
When you want to get more serious, read this essential book on what it takes to write great literature. It has great tips and tricks and examples from writers’ lives as well as his own experience as a teacher.
The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri
An old school book that is part how-to book, part philosophy book. For playwrights but is great for any writer. Check out the chapter where he breaks down A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. So good!
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