What I learned from writing 750 words a day for 365 days

My biggest motivation, now nearing three years without missing a day writing usually 500 to 2,000 words daily, which applies to exercise and a million other habits you don&#x27;t want to lose, is<p><i>If you miss one day you can miss two, if you miss two it&#x27;s all over.</i><p>(which I wrote up here -- <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/a-model-for-consistency" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;joshuaspodek.com&#x2F;a-model-for-consistency</a>)<p>Words to live by if you want consistency and discipline in your life.<p>I&#x27;m also coming up on two years without missing a single day of exercising, for which the same philosophy motivates me -- <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/burpees-the-one-year-review" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;joshuaspodek.com&#x2F;burpees-the-one-year-review</a><p>EDIT: Another lesson I learned: That the route to quality generally comes from quantity -- <a href="http://joshuaspodek.com/route-quality-quantity" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;joshuaspodek.com&#x2F;route-quality-quantity</a>.

A couple of observations:<p><i>You can only get better with experience.</i><p>But remember that <i>improving</i> requires <i>both</i> practice <i>and</i> feedback. Practicing something that&#x27;s developing the wrong habits will just reinforce those bad habits through neural pathway strengthening. This is a key principle in many skill activities (music, sports, gymnastics, strength training). It&#x27;s one of the nuances to Gladwell&#x27;s &quot;10,000 hours&quot; premise.<p><i>Go Full Screen &#x2F; Eliminate distractions</i><p>I&#x27;d have to heartily agree. Full screen might not be entirely necessary (I often have reference or other materials present while composing), but removing distracting elements from my environment is hugely useful. It&#x27;s also ironic to note Ben&#x27;s use of animated gifs to highlight his blog post (I ended up removing both with the Chrome element blocker plugin). In general I either modify the CSS for sites I visit frequently, or use tools such as Readability (or Pocket or Instapaper) to provide simplified, streamlined, uniform, text-dominant presentations of online material (curating and tagging the content is an added bonus).<p><i>good writing is mostly good editing</i><p>Absolutely. I&#x27;ve long considered it a bit like sculpting in clay. First you gob a bunch of stuff up there, then you start carving away at what shouldn&#x27;t be there, occasionally moving bits around.

<i>good writing is mostly good editing</i><p>Absolutely. What the internet needs is some collaborative site where people can trade editing for article submissions. That way everybody can get better at their editing skills, which is where the real impact can be made.

I&#x27;m in the early stage of something similar: I&#x27;m going for 1000 sessions of 1000 words each. I&#x27;m currently in the 0110s.<p>The main thing I&#x27;m learning is: If I keep going without looking back, if I churn out lots and lots of material with minimal pre-selecting, I WILL surprise myself.<p>I think pg wrote something along the lines of- the best ideas that haven&#x27;t already been acted upon are the good ideas that NECESSARILY look like bad ideas.<p>Similarly, a lot of the good writing I get is what &quot;feels&quot; like meaningless drivel (at the beginning), but on hindsight turns out to be revealing, compelling, interesting. (This is all subjective, of course, but the response from others can be telling.)<p>So that&#x27;s what I&#x27;m going for, by chasing real scale. I&#x27;ve written about 110,000 words of stream-of-consciousness drivel so far. I&#x27;m betting that I unearth some interesting gems when I&#x27;m at around 500,000.<p>As long as there is SOME degree of reflection, you will learn and grow as you go. I do this by writing summaries of my earlier drafts that interest me. Another cool thing that happens when you write in large quantities is that you get more detached from your writing, and you don&#x27;t feel like you&#x27;re &quot;killing your babies&quot;- you can approach it with the cold, calculative and impersonal editor&#x27;s pen because the sheer volume desensitizes you, in a good way.<p>A pottery metaphor. If you spend all your time trying to perfect the first pot you make, it&#x27;ll probably still look like crap. If you try to make 1,000 pots as quickly as you can, some of those pots will surprise you with how they turn out, and you&#x27;ll learn a lot more about the nuances of pottery in the process.<p>Same with writing. For me, at least.

I lived abroad for 365 days. Each day I wrote a &quot;recap&quot;, and posted it to Facebook. Many recaps were over 1,000 words long. I received tons of feedback, often in real life. It was a brilliant experience. I agree with many of the points in the OP. I would like to add that there was no such thing as oversharing. Honest, gut-wrenchingly intimate details (with some anonymizing and filtering), framed in a well-composed piece of writing, somehow stand on their own. They become more personal to the reader than to me, the writer. They contrast to the whitewashed self-portraits of most people on social networks. One point I disagree on is the importance of editing. I think the key to good writing is a solid first draft. If you are editing content, rather than grammar, ordering, syntax or structure... then throw it out and start over. Before writing, give your thoughts some time to bake. Then write them down, and edit minimally. If you want to edit more, put it away and edit the next day. I never did that, starting and finishing most pieces on the same day. But, I have had regrets on every piece of writing I have ever produced. Lastly, I explored every last idea that I had. You should have an idea queue. Get to all of them.

I learned something different from writing 750 words for a year.<p>I grew to despise the need to do this exercise daily as I slowly realized that I would not get any meaningful improvement in my writing. I would not be Hemingway. My brain was too set in its ways.<p>One night as I was working on my masters I forgot to log in 750words before midnight. At first I felt sadness, but in the following days and ever since all I&#x27;ve felt has been relief.<p>I guess some people are just better readers than writers.

Am I allowed to be a bit disappointed? Writing so many words in one year and when reporting about it the carefully chosen title is &quot;10 Things I Learned From Writing 750 Words a Day For 365 Days&quot;?<p>If I had a spare domain name and 5 mn I would create a randomly generated Title Cap string on this template at xthingsilearnedfromdoingyforzday.com and the page content would be &lt;p&gt;Nothing&lt;&#x2F;p&gt; in random size and random background and text color.

Definitely not as impressive as some of the other commenters here, but I&#x27;m 6 days into a &#x27;Write 1,000 words for 100 days&#x27; challenge and find this inspiring. I&#x27;ve noticed after day 3 that the writing is coming easier, and I look forward to the feeling of getting it done.<p>I moved from Wordpress to Medium after a day, as Medium took focus off of themes, widgets, and everything else besides the writing and allowed me to just write. It&#x27;s pretty exciting seeing the read stats and realizing that something you&#x27;re writing (as off the cuff as it may be) is being read by hundreds of other people. Thanks for writing this, and I hope to get as far as you do in improving my writing and making it a habit.

I used 750Words for a long time. After NSA scandal, I have had a hard time divulging my guts out to an online data center. I am thinking about setting up a client side encrypted Emacs&#x2F;Org-mode journal system. Although I have to say that little strip on top of 750Words that tells you how many days has one written consistently and the analysis were very helpful in keeping up with the daily writing. Ultimately, I grew tired of writing 750 words daily about myself.

Applies also to startups:<p>&quot;If you want to save yourself time and sanity, get the horrible first draft out of the way so you can start making your writing great.&quot;

Funny how people recommend writing X number of words per day, but no one ever recommends saying to program Y amount of lines each day, as it supposedly builds bad habits.<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t writing X number of words per day build bad habits as well? Honest question.

&gt; It’s much easier to edit something to become great than to slowly write a perfect first draft, which I don’t think is even possible.<p>It is even possible. Isn&#x27;t slowly writing a first draft exactly what you are doing by revising?

Thanks for sharing this, I find building new habits and skills is an exercise of building discipline, the realizations you&#x27;ve shared can apply to many things.

I&#x27;m 30 days away from finishing my second attempt at a 365 day photo project[1] (where you take a photo every day for an entire year). Interestingly, everything[2] Ben writes about writing 750 words a day holds true for my project. I suppose I&#x27;ll have to do a writeup on January 1st after I finish this one and kick off the next one.<p>1. Process over product<p>Totally agree. Being absolutely comfortable with the technical fundamentals is far easier if you&#x27;re not concerned with the quality of your output on a day-to-day basis and—instead—concern yourself with the quality of your output over time. The quality of my output, in general, has increased over time as I&#x27;ve spent more time immersed in the craft.<p>2. Know why you&#x27;re [shooting]<p>I&#x27;m shooting because I want to become a better photographer, get better at capturing my artistic vision, and, eventually, get published or shown.<p>3. Planning always helps<p>It sure does. There are days (or even weeks) where I realize that it&#x27;s 11PM and I haven&#x27;t shot anything for the day. Having a shot list to draw from, along with the occasional planned shoot, helps a lot.<p>4. There are no good first drafts<p>To produce my one published photo every day, I&#x27;ll shoot somewhere between 2 and 800 photos, with the average being about 35. Yesterday, for instance, I had a photo shoot where I shot 813 photos. I&#x27;ll probably winnow that down to about 30 &#x27;selects.&#x27;<p>6. Jerry Seinfeld is Smart<p>&quot;objects in motion tend to stay in motion&quot;<p>7. Mix up your [photography]<p>Yesterday was a self-portrait triptych. The day before that was a dog on a table (always bring your camera!). Shooting different things helps me get better at different types of photography (studio, street, still life, macro, etc etc), but they&#x27;ll inevitably inform each other in ways I couldn&#x27;t even imagine until after.<p>8. Get it done early<p>Having my daily photo out of the way earlier in the day inevitably makes me feel lighter and more relaxed. It is a strain, even though it&#x27;s just for fun.<p>9. The ultimate practice for…<p>I love shooting studio self portraits. They give me a chance to practice different lighting setups, and (in a lot of cases) fail miserably at it. But, by failing miserably on my own and alone, I have the chance to perfect or totally write off that setup before I try using it on a subject.<p>10. Prime Yourself<p>Flickr, 500px, even Instagram. Plus photo blogs, photo books, art galleries, and so on. I spend a significant amount of time looking at others&#x27; photography.<p>[1] In case you&#x27;re curious: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/sets/72157632426455084/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.flickr.com&#x2F;photos&#x2F;aaronbrethorst&#x2F;sets&#x2F;72157632426...</a><p>[2] #5 is the only &#x27;lesson&#x27; that doesn&#x27;t hold for my project for obvious reasons.

What kind of stuff do people who do this write?