On Writing: The Habit That's Leading to Success

The last two week have been interesting. My daily blogging got noticed by first the folks over at Castalia House, and regular appearances in the Sensor Sweep have lead to new opportunities. The first, which I mentioned at the Study, is that I'm now part of a fiction anthology project put together by Jesse Lucas. The second is that I am now a contributing blogger at the SuperversiveSF blog. I'll post there a few times a week, and you'll see that post come up on the Blog Roll to the right here.

That's all good news, and I expect that if I can keep this up it will bring me more down the road, but I want to take a moment here to confirm something Scott Adams said a while back when talking about why Trump gets where he wants to go in like: he makes success a habit, not a goal, and he does it by cultivating and curating a stack of useful talents as the core of this habit.

The core habit a writer, regardless of what they want to write, is to write. Backside in the chair, either typing or hand-writing, every single day. That's why I took up blogging, and why I do it every day. It's there to get me writing, and keep me writing, so that not only is posting a habit but all of the things that goes into being a successful writer get daily reinforcement as a result of blogging daily.

It's not different, in essence, from being a daily columnist for a newspaper. The key differences are that I choose the topic and have no editors other than myself to satisfy. The other writers that I know now visit this blog in particular (if not the other two I maintain) can confirm the importance of making this a habit and not a goal in the comments below. Moving from this to writing stories is then a matter of making a lateral move and then extending existing practices to incorporate a few new elements; trainers, I think you can speak to how you develop someone's capabilities, so you too are welcome to comment on such below.

10,000 pots. That's what this path is: 10,000 pots to mastery, but before then you're going to get noticed and that is what's going on now. I've got plenty left to learn, so I'm making that a habit now too, as I did when I was in university.