Yesterday, we looked at ten habits that make writing harder. The list was pretty depressing because most people have most of those habits in their life.

It’s not all bad news, though. You can implement better habits into your life that make writing a lot easier. Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists alongside other systems and dynamics in your life. Just as with the human body, everything affects everything else.

Here are ten habits that will make your writing easier, more fun, and more effective.

1. Getting 8 hours of sleep.
2. Meditation.
3. Journaling.
4. Apologizing when you’re wrong.
5. Taking a walk each day.
6. Drinking enough water.
7. Being generous with your time, connections, and money.
8. Having a set time to write.
9. Making a gratitude list.
10. Publishing your work.

We make writing so much harder than it needs to be. Pick one of these habits and try to practice it each day for the next week. See how it improves everything else in your life, including your writing.

Daily Question: Which of these habits will you put into practice for the next week, and what effect do you think it will have?

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Writing is a serious business, but that doesn’t mean you always have to be serious. A great way to write more, and have more fun doing it, is to make a game of it.

This can work in a lot of different ways. One of my favorites is to see how much I can write in a specific amount of time. I’ll set a timer for 15 or 30 minutes, and then go to town. Sometimes I’ll even have a competition with myself to see if I can beat my own record.

This makes total sense, because after all, you are your biggest competitor. As writers, we should always be trying to get better at our craft and improve every aspect of our writing business.

This is all part of a bigger picture of not taking yourself too seriously to begin with. Life is hard enough already without all the pressure we put on ourselves. So don’t be afraid to try new things and make a game out of your writing.

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One of the tropes that seems to follow creative types around is the myth of the “tortured artist.” The myth goes something like this: creative work is very, very difficult, and it requires the artist to give their blood, sweat, and tears to their creative work.

This tortured artist myth has been used to describe why so many creative types are depressed or otherwise messed up. And if you look at the number of popular musical artists from the 1970s and 80s who died from a drug overdose, it almost seems to be a real phenomenon that great artists are indeed tortured souls.

But where does this myth come from? We don’t have time for a long history lesson here, but here is one explanation for why creative types, including writers, like to perpetuate this myth.

The reason is because we want to believe the work is hard. We like the idea that the creative work we are doing is extraordinarily difficult.

But what if we took the opposite approach? What if we assumed that writing is fun, easy, and enjoyable? Creativity experts often talk about getting into a state of “flow”—a mental state where we let our subconscious creative mind take over, and we are so focused and lost in our work that time seems to speed up. Hours go by without us even noticing it.

It’s hard to get into a state of flow if we constantly believe that our writing feels like torture. Yes, writing can be challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like hard work. As Neil Gaiman said, “This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

So the next time you write, assume that you will have a great time doing your work. Assume that it will be easy but challenging. You might even find yourself getting into a state of flow as you put one word after another.

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