Write Four Words a Day

Most everyone I know has started a blog novel and journal, most everyone I know has also stopped writing a blog, novel or journal after only a few weeks of trying. There are lots of reasons for this. Journals come down to not feeling interesting or profound, Blogs are usually stopped because no one is reading them and novels, well because they are freaking novels.

I myself had this problem for years, until I started practicing one simple trick. Write four words a day, ever day.

Surely you can find time for four words, surely there is no excuse not to be able to write four measly words. Heck, when I first started this method, often I’d just sit down and write, “The day was cold.” But then something amazing started happening, more often than not, it would go on. “The Day was cold. I tried walking around the streets of LA, but it began to rain, so I jumped into a coffee shop. I met a girl there, I think she may have been homeless, I could see it in her eyes. Nothing she said seemed completely whole, she was lying to me, lying because she didn’t have an answer, or maybe she was afraid of the truth”

You see, this is a hack, a simple fix. Often we say we have nothing to write, often we say we don’t have time, and if you actually end up only write four words, than that is probably true. But, more often than not, you will discover you just needed a reason to sit down, you needed to be forced to write something, you just needed to get started.

There is a secondary part of “four words a day.” You have to do it for 6 months. 6 months is not a lot of time, but it takes that much time to realize if you are writing anything of value, it takes that long to get viewers to your blog and start figuring out your novel. If you are writing a screenplay, you will have a first draft in a month or two, but it takes 6 to see if you really have something.

It’s four words, it’s maybe 1 minute a day. You can do it. Now you have no excuse to keep going.