The C Word

Why commitment is greater than consistency if you want to meet your writing goals

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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One piece of advice that writers get all the time is to “write every day.” This advice is lobbed straight at our heads, whether we are professional writers trying to make money from our craft, or amateur writers simply writing for the joy and the pleasure of writing.

“Write every day” is the popular mantra because doing so is supposed to develop a habit of consistently practicing the craft, and if combined with any kind of study of the craft itself will naturally, inevitably lead to improvement.

Of course, I'm sure it's possible to write every day and actually get worse at writing, at least theoretically, but I've never met anybody who fits that bill.

…but then again, I'm not sure I've met very many people who actually write every day, anyway.

In my experience, people find workarounds to explain why they didn't write yesterday, and why they won't be writing tomorrow, but since they wrote today, that for sure proves that they write every day! Right???!?!?

This, of course, leads into a lot of quibbling over what it means to write every day. For instance, what does “every day” mean? (WangXian enthusiasts can just stay out of this one! 😉) Seven days a week? Or does “every day” mean five days a week, a.k.a. the traditional workweek? Does “writing” mean a certain word count? A certain number of pages? A certain amount of time?

Those variables are dependent on the individual, of course, but they also allow for a hell of a lot equivocation.

This isn't meant as a call out post, because I’ve been that person as often as you have. I just want to explain that as a piece of well meant advice, “write every day” is lacking in a lot of ways.

Which, honestly, is a major reason why I initially thought up and then launched the 1 Million Words Club. Writing one million words is a lot more concrete than some loosey-goosey goal such as “write every day” or practice for 10,000 hours. It doesn’t matter how you get there, as long as you keep writing toward one million words.

But in the end, what all this advice boils down to is a demand for consistency. Grudgingly, writing gurus will admit that it's okay i guess if you don't write every day as long as you write consistently. It's all in the name of consistency: write words consistently and write often consistently and you will consistently have measurable improvements.

True enough.

But what I have found again and again and again is it no one is really inspired or motivated by the idea of consistency. It’s an attractive concept, but it either has no impact on their goals or becomes a burden that makes them feel like they are always falling short of what they are supposed to be doing.

The problem is that people don’t realize that by itself, consistency is not a goal, even if it is treated like one. Consistency is simply a productivity tool.

I learned the hard way to simply give up on the ideal of consistency after trying for years to write to a strict schedule, or daily word count goal, or a daily time writing session, or a weekly timed writing session, or to write during my lunch hour for at least 15 minutes, or…

You get the picture.

So what does work?

Commitment.

It is by far the more important “C” word.

I am committed to writing my next one million words. I am committed to publishing the serial stories that I want to see out in the world. I am committed to my goal of building a career as a writer and a storyteller based on nurturing a fandom for my stories and my characters (or multiple fandoms! Look, I'm not picky!).

That commitment is what gets me to the keyboard on a regular (if inconsistent!) basis and inspires me to write. I'm making a commitment to a goal that resonates for me at a very deep level, psychologically and emotionally. Consistency is a tool I use to drive that commitment, but without my dedication to that goal, consistency loses potency. It becomes pointless. It becomes an obligation that supports nothing.

I acknowledge that for some people, it might very well be the reverse. They might be commitment averse, in the classic sense of not wanting to get tied down to anything, so consistency might be a more comfortable choice to make in their writing practice. They can be consistent, because it's not a commitment in any way that matters.

So, yes, I suppose it's possible to commit yourself to being consistent. Although to be perfectly honest, I've met very few people who've succeeded at doing that over the course of months and years and decades.

To be clear: decades is the time-frame I'm talking about here.

Anybody can batten down the hatches and ride out a temporary storm of consistency. But what are you going to be doing next year at this time? What are you going to be doing five years from now? And where will your practice be in twenty years?

A lot of productivity and goal setting gurus use this as a fear tactic: “You will waste your life if decades years from now you are in the same place you are now!” It is a very good fear tactic. (Unless you're happy where you are now! In which case you will just spend the next twenty years being happy. All power to you, and don't listen to the naysayers!)

But the “twenty years from now!!!!” framework should not be used as a cudgel to bludgeon you with. It should simply be a way to look at how you can adapt yourself to the goals you want to achieve in the long term.

I can tell you that for me personally, being a consistent writer has failed abysmally for the past twenty years. So I think maybe the next twenty years will be about committing to my goals, to my dreams, to my writing, and to myself.

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