daily writing habit Quotes

I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.

Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.

All through my career I've written 1,000 words a day - even if I've got a hangover. You've got to discipline yourself if you're professional. There's no other way.

Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don't wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.

I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.

I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day.

There isn't a single day I don't do some writing -- if you don't, you won't have a book. When you're self-employed it is very easy to burn away your time instead -- answering e-mails, surfing the Internet, or hanging out with friends. You really must have the discipline to sit down and write every day. Most of what I am writing is living in the back of my head or in my subconscious. I find if I write every day, my subconscious will do the job for me.

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.

What you have to do as a writer is . . . write day in and day out no matter what happens.

Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration.

I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.

If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.

My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.

I write every day for most of the work day, and I try to write 2,500 words per day... If I don't make it a routine and treat it like a job, I'd never get anything done.