The Craft: Five Words
Since I went ahead and posted about this on Freelancefolder.com, in a comment to a (useful) post called “7 Can’t-Miss Ways To Kick-Start The Writing Habit,” I figured I probably ought to talk about it here. It’s something I came up with 4-5 years ago.
It’s called Five Words. It’s a way of getting yourself started writing, and getting yourself into the habit of writing daily.
It’s what it sounds like: commit each and every day to sitting down and writing a minimum of five words.
They don’t have to be good words. They should be sensible and purposeful and bring you at least plausibly closer to your objective: “The End.” That means not just writing the same word five times - unless for some reason that’s actually called for - or five random words.
Once you do your Five Words, you are okay with yourself for today. That’s your pact with yourself. You don’t have to do more.
Of course, you can. Five Words is a minimum, not a maximum. Clearly, what you really want is to write more. With Five Words you’re trying to trick yourself into a state conducive to writing. You’re also trying to create a habit of going there daily.
There’s nothing magical about the number five. I snagged it because it strikes me as a solid sort of number. It’s enough to produce a decent sentence. The point is to set a goal so low it’s just near-impossible not to reach it.
Again, the keys are state and habit.
Five Words serves me, and various other people who’ve tried it, pretty well. You can apply it to endeavors other than writing: come up with some other simple quantum of any task, such that it’s more trouble to talk yourself out of doing it than just doing it.
One caveat: the Five Words technique may not help you produce as much as you want or need to. If it doesn’t there are other tricks to use - the post I linked to above offers some good ones. The first step toward producing enough every day is producing every day. “Five Words” is an easy way to build that fundamental habit.