"Not a day without a line," leaving unfinished notes for tomorrow, "bird by bird" — 3 ideas that became the foundation of my year-long writing marathon.
Day 364 of the “not a day without a line” challenge.
I have a friend and fellow countryman, Volodya Bahnenko. We’re both from the Kherson region, and we’re both fanatically in love with literature.
I once heard a few interesting ideas from Volodya.
The first was that one writer followed a principle that went: “not a day without a line.” Meaning, no matter the state he was in or the circumstances, he had to write at least one new line of text. No exceptions.
The second idea was that Ernest Hemingway often stopped writing for the day while he still had some notes and ideas left over for the next “literary day.” The next day, when he sat back down at his desk, he already had drafts and a few leftover thoughts from the day before, and he’d just start editing them or continue developing the storyline already in the text.
The third idea came from a writer who framed it as “bird by bird.” Her approach was that instead of thinking about the whole book and trying to grasp the entire concept at once, it’s enough to write about one bird today, describe another tomorrow, a third the day after. That way, by focusing on one specific bird each day and repeating that long enough, you end up with a complete book.
These ideas really stuck with me.
Volodya has worked with text for a long time. He has his own books, and he’s recommended or handed me plenty of useful things over the years. But these 3 principles became the foundation of my “not a day without a line” challenge, which lasted a whole year.
Throughout this literary marathon, I used all 3 approaches, and they worked great.
Tomorrow this experiment ends, but my work with text is only just beginning. In yesterday’s post I explained in more detail why I’m scaling back the daily posting format for now.
I’ve started working on several books, and now I’ll spend 15 to 40 minutes writing every morning.
I’ll post on social media less often — whenever I want, and only once the text is genuinely ready.
Over this year, I built a habit and developed the skill of writing every single day.
My next step is to publish my books and shape my thoughts into a coherent structure.
When I started this experiment a year ago, I never thought it would have such a strong effect on me, or that so many people would follow these daily posts.
One simple, good habit, 15 minutes a day, can create a huge number of new opportunities and substantially build discipline.
Every one of us can start improving our life right where we are, with what we have right now.
Thank you to everyone who read these text reflections of mine in the blog. It’s thanks to you, your reactions, your DMs, comments, and reposts, that I realized my future books would be useful and would find an audience too.