How I Created a Better Writing Habit by Becoming a Morning Person
5 a.m. isn’t so bad when you’re doing something you love.
Falling Out of Creativity
I was never a morning person. In my younger years, before I became a parent, I would have described myself as a night owl. I loved sleep. I took naps for the hell of it. Nothing could motivate me to wake up early — not even my 8 a.m. college classes.
Then, babies. IYKYK, but the long and short of it is that kids wake up at all hours of the night, and so you become very familiar with fractured sleep and shortened periods of rest.
During the long, lonely, hazy years of baby-having, I gave up my personal creative endeavors. Well, mostly. I still considered myself a writer. I still dabbled. I told people, “I’m a writer.” And then sometimes, if they asked follow-up questions, I would tell them, “someday I will pick it back up. Someday when I’m out of this season of life, I’ll be able to dedicate more time to the craft.”
Someday…
Then, pretty much in the blink of an eye, someday arrived.
Kids did a number on me, body and soul. I suffered from postpartum depression, and a truly awful condition called D-MER, that, to put plainly, made me feel like jumping in front of a moving train or throwing myself from the top of a tall building for the first few moments of breastfeeding. Every. Single. Time. I breastfed.
Creativity had previously aided me during depressive episodes or periods of general sadness (global pandemic, anyone?…), and after kid #3, I was prepared to need some outlet, some way to help myself. I decided, when kid #3 was six-months-old, that I would participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again — after a three-year hiatus.
NaNoWriMo
For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a global non-profit organization that challenges program participants to write 50 thousand words in 30 days, which breaks down to 1,667 words per day.
It’s a blast. It’s also kinda hard.
I’d done it before, so I knew the ins and outs of the challenge. And I had an idea. Those are two very important steps. Pre-steps, if you will.
But… when was I going to find the time to write the bones of a new novel with a six-month-old, an eighteen-month-old, and a five-year-old? With a husband? A job? A house to clean? A life to live?
At the crack of dawn, before God was even awake? That’s crazy. I’m not a morning person —
But wait. I was already up everyday at 5 a.m. for the early morning breastfeed…
5 a.m. Writers’ Club
I’m not the only one who gets up early to write. There are lots of parents and corporate Americans and writers with other day jobs who use the early morning hours to be productive. I had never been that person, in the before times. My writing routine had generally consisted of long evening and night hours spent gorging myself on coffee, tea and pastries at a local cafe, brainstorming with my writer friends, and gallivanting around Kansas City to various pubs, coffee shops and libraries to write (or to talk about writing).
Could I really create a new habit so vastly different than anything I’d done before? Write at 5 a.m.? With three kids age five and under? With a fulltime job?
Yes. So how did I do it?
My Process is Mostly Dedication and Discipline
These ideas are not mind-blowing or even all that unique. They are very simple. But for whatever reason, simple things are hard for people to implement.
The first step is not even really an action. It’s just a truth:
I love the work of writing, not just the end result.
I say again:
You have to love the work, not just the end result.
What does loving the work mean? I wanted to get up and work on my plot, and my characters. I wanted to build scenes and craft a magic system and figure out hairy situations. I thought about my story constantly. I looked forward to my next dedicated writing session. I wanted to talk to people about my ideas, and get their feedback and opinions. I truly enjoyed the process, which drives my writing habit — showing up every day, no fail, and putting in the work.
In my experience, most people who want to be writers actually just want to be authors. And what I mean by that is, they want to have a book they wrote — the end result — but ultimately don’t, and likely won’t, because they don’t love the work of writing the book. It’s too hard. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Reasons, reasons, reasons.
Second, and this is maybe just as important as the first point above: doing [insert thing you love here] first thing in the morning makes it very, very easy not to skip it.
Being creative first thing in the morning protects your sacred time.
That writing habit I used to have? Where I wrote at cafes and bars and libraries with friends, usually late into the night? In retrospect, those writing sessions weren’t usually very productive. Why? Well, because it was the end of the day, and I’d used up a ton of energy doing other things. By writing first thing every morning, I could breathe a sigh of relief come 4 p.m. when my kids were melting down and I was exhausted and everyone was hangry and seventeen others things had come up and things were erupting into chaos. I had already done my writing, so that, at the very least, was protected.
The same is true for other things, like working out or journaling or creating a gratitude practice. If you wait until the very last part of the day, too many things could go wrong, and you have far too much time to come up with excuses as to why you can’t do it.
Third, having some specific, measurable, actionable goals helps. “I want to write a book!” isn’t really a goal. It’s a dream. It’s a complete sentence. It’s a thing a lot of people say.
Be smart. Set realistic goals.
My goal was to get up every day to write at 5 a.m. This was attainable because I was already getting up between 4–5 a.m. to feed the baby. So I knew I could do it.
My 5 a.m. is not your 5 a.m.
Maybe you can get up at 6 a.m. Maybe you work nights and so your 5 a.m. is actually 3 p.m. to put in an hour of writing. It needs to be specific. “Get up early” won’t cut it.
I had another goal, which isn’t really pertinent to creating a better writing habit by becoming a morning person — but the preparation part of this goal very much is, so I feel it’s important to share.
I went into NaNoWriMo knowing that I could write 50 thousand words in 30 days because I had done it nine other times. In fact, I usually wrote something more like 75 thousand words in 30 days.
What I had never done before was write “the end” on the first draft of a manuscript during NaNoWriMo. So I set about plotting, world-building, and outlining my novel idea before (so much emphasis on “before”) November 1st, and then my goal was pretty simple, though specific and attainable: Write the complete first draft of my novel during NaNoWriMo.
I can’t and won’t get into the nitty-gritty of plotting, story structure, outlining, and world-building now. That’s a different post, but what I can tell you is that all of this goal-setting and prep work was… work. I strongly urge writers who want to build a better writing habit to actually put in the work. Do not cut corners. Set yourself up for success. Do not self-eliminate.
If you don’t set yourself up for success, your goals will mean nothing to your 5 a.m. willpower. Don’t leave your success up to your 5 a.m. willpower. Do the work and make it hard for yourself not to do the thing you’ve set out to do.
This leads me to my final point. The fourth step in creating a better writing habit and becoming a morning person.
Celebrate your successes!
This is an exercise in accountability, really. Even if you don’t call it that, telling people what you’re doing will make it easier to keep doing that thing.
The other powerful part of celebrating your successes is that you may just find that you build yourself a community and a platform. If you’re writing a book, that book is gonna need readers. Set yourself up for future success by getting people interested early.
Celebrating success looks different for everyone. For me, it was bringing my husband into my creative process more, opening up to him and other people IRL and not just on the internet (hello, fellow introverts!). It was posting updates on my Instagram during November, and then continuing to keep people posted. I started a TikTok, even though I don’t post nearly enough. I use it as a sort of diary for my book-writing and literary agent search process. And even if it goes nowhere, at least when I finally do get that book deal, I will have the social handles I want (power of positive thinking, and all that…).
Recap
In twelve years of trying and failing to write novels, nothing has been better kindling to my creative fire than building a solid writing habit by becoming a morning person.
Let’s recap on my process. This list is cumulative, meaning, each thing builds upon the next and helps you solidify your new writing habit.
- You have to love the work, not just the end result!
- If you don’t love the actual writing, revising, editing, and problem-solving of storytelling, being a writer may not be for you.
- You can learn to love the work of writing by shifting your perspective from “writing is hard” to “writing is a puzzle I want to solve.”
2. Protect your creative time by doing it first thing in the morning.
- Or, first thing when you wake up, whenever that may be. For me, and for most working adults/parents, it will mean getting up early, before the insanity of the day unfolds.
- Getting up early will allow you to actually do the work. Actually doing the work will feed your motivation because you will see yourself attaining your goals. Attaining your goals and strengthening your motivation will make it easier to continue getting up early. It’s the circle of creation.
3. Set realistic goals.
- “Write a book” is not a goal. “Write the first draft of a novel in 60 days” is a goal.
- Do the prep work to ensure you are setting yourself up for success! Your goal is set, now what do you need to do to ensure you can stick to your timeline?
4. Celebrate your successes!
- Share with people IRL or online. Post to a blog. Record your writing sessions. Whatever makes you feel good about your accomplishments while also holding yourself accountable works.
The Result
What I ended up doing was writing every single morning starting in the 5 a.m. hour for the entire month of November.
Sometime in late winter, the baby was no longer needing that early morning breastfeed, but I still got up early and worked. It was no longer hard. I just wanted to do it.
I wrote “the end” on the first draft of my magical realism novel The Forest before November was up, and by the time January rolled around, I was deep in revisions.
Using my new morning person personality trait, I was able to finish my novel, complete with multiple rounds of revisions and edits, alpha readers, and beta readers, in 507 days.
I’m now submitting to literary agents and working on book two.
And trust me when I say, if I can do it, so can you, friend. Come join me at the 5 a.m. writers’ club. All are welcome.
