Sometimes the thought of starting a writing project can feel overwhelming: excuses can flood your creative brain: It’s too big a project — I’ll never get it done. I don’t have it in me! Soon enough, your mind drifts away to shinier things, such as what’s for supper, what’s on t.v. right now, or, I wonder what the score was in last night’s big game? By this time, you’ve wandered away from the computer, or your pen and paper, distracted from your writing project.

Regular Plinky.com users know that Plinky is an awesome source of daily creative writing prompts to help you develop your daily writing habit.

Cory Doctorow is a prolific Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. In an article on Locus Magazine entitled Writing in the Age of Distraction, Doctorow says slow, steady progress is the key to achieving your writing goals:

When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard. — Cory Doctorow

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