How to write every day with joy.

After many years of working with writers, I can confidently say about 80% of the people I talk to about coaching tell me their wish is to write with “more consistency.” This is across the board: I hear it from people who are starting to write for the first time, writers who have been writing for years, and published authors who are mid-career. It’s a thing.

We’ve been taught that to be a writer, you must write every day, whether you want to or not. It seems that no matter where you go for writing advice, some flavour of this belief is spicing the mix. It’s a strong story. And it makes you sit up and pay attention, right? Liz Gilbert talks about it in Big Magic, and Stephen Pressfield talks about it in The War of Art. Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, all the luminaries agree.

You want to be a professional? You want to be a real writer? Write every day, no matter what. Be consistent!

Fair enough. This is good advice. Of course it’s great to write every day: writing is a practice, and everything gets better and better with practice. But can we soften this into a more humane instruction?

What if you allowed yourself to treat writing as something that brought you genuine joy and pleasure? Might you want to do it every day?

In a recent email from Stephanie Harrison, author of The New Happy, I read the research behind this advice:

If you want to achieve your goals, make them joyful. Make them fun. Make them interesting. Make them fascinating. Make them engaging. Make them meaningful. If you do this, you will never have to worry about ‘being consistent’ ever again.

Joy is the key! But it’s easy to skip over joy when we tell ourselves to “write every day.” Literary society still runs on the puritanical work ethic code, which sneers at pleasure. It’s time to do this differently, okay? Be radical. Have fun.

You get to love your creative work.

It’s still valid when you have fun doing it. Pressure is inherent to creativity. That’s okay! You can write good stuff and have fun and experience the frustrations of failure. You don’t have to force yourself to write every day, because you are already naturally creative. See what I mean?

You can invite yourself into the rewarding joy that is deep play. Deep play is serious business! It’s not just bubbles and rainbows. (Although it might include bubbles and rainbows, depending on your craft).

I’ll summarize the study: researchers discovered that motivation exists on a continuum. One end is extrinsic (I’m doing this because I’ll be rewarded or punished). The other end is intrinsic (I’m doing this because it’s joyful and interesting).

After 40 years of research, they saw that when you pursue intrinsically motivated goals, you experience greater happiness and you’re more likely to get to your desired outcome. Meanwhile, people who rely on extrinsic motivation are more likely to abandon their goals and generally feel like life kinda sucks.

If you find it easy to be consistent with your writing, you’re probably intrinsically motivated. You find it enjoyable, and you’re fascinated by your own creative process.

If you struggle to be consistent, it could be a sign that part of you loves writing, but another part of you is extrinsically motivated. You want to get an agent, you want to get published, you want the gold stars, please! Of course you do.

It’s a scale. You can shift your motivation by bringing joy to your writing practice. Enjoyment is a state of mind, totally within your control. Your thoughts matter. The words you use to talk to yourself have power.

Try this: instead of telling yourself I have to write every day, tell yourself: I get to write every day.

It’s true! Even if it’s just 10 minutes a day, you get to do this.

Want to add more joy to your writing practice? Join Centered for daily writing prompts and monthly workshops designed to help you reconnect and develop your intrinsic motivation.

Read more about the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation study on The New Happy here.

If you want to be more intrinsically motivated with your work and are having challenges doing this yourself, contact me. We can sort it out together.

Photo credit (top): Kid Circus on Unsplash.