My Daily Writing Process
4AM
I’m not a morning person, but I always force myself to wake up at 4am every day, even on weekends. That means going to bed at no later than 9pm the night before. I adopted this sleeping pattern a while back ‘cos I find that early morning works for me for doing stuff that I would have trouble doing later in the day like meditating, journaling and writing. Writing is something that I’ve always wanted to pursue but things like job, social life and other things always seemed to get in the way. Writing is like meditating I guess ‘cos you need to get into the zone and it takes a kind of focus that I can’t seem to get into during the day or late at night. But in the super early hours of the morning when you’re still half asleep, I feel like it’s the optimal time to start pounding the keyboard or writing down ideas for my stories. I try not to write for more than two hours a day as I don’t want to spend the whole day doing just one thing. But in those two hours, nothing matters. I read on the concept of flow state where only the task at hand matters and time disappears. Lot of people practice this flow state through action sports like surfing, skiing and sky diving. I practice flow state through writing. And let me tell you, the flow state is real. I highly recommend you to get into the flow state. it takes a bit of practice at first, but you need to keep at it. My process of writing through flow is waking up at 4 am, making myself a pot of coffee and sitting at my desk. It takes about ten to fifteen minutes for me to get into this almost trance-like state of mind. At first I literally start typing gibberish and nonsense, and you have to let this happen. Once you start typing something seems to happen. It’s as if another version of yourself takes over and you simply become the passenger in this ride.
An hour or two literally melts away and I’m left with couple of thousand words of passage for a novel that I’m working on. So if you’re someone that needs to write for school, uni or work and is struggling to put words together, give my little technique a go. If you keep at it for few weeks and months, you will be able to punch out pages and pages of content in no time.
Happy writing everyone.