
The value of establishing a writing streak is enormous. Making the commitment to write something, anything, every day, creates a habit that is hard to break, and especially once you have sailed past 1,000 days, then 1,100 days, and then 1,200 days. You just don’t want to go back and start counting from 1 all over again.
Still, inevitably you’ll have a day like this one, a day when you can’t think of anything to write about except the streak.
It’s weird. You might have just finished your first significant bit of fiction in almost a decade and published your first significant bit of fiction in nine years.
It may, in fact, be your first published book of any kind in more than a year.
You might have all sorts of ideas rolling through your head.
And yet still, some days, you find that none of your ideas are formed well enough to convert into a coherent blog post.
You kick yourself for not working far enough in advance, despite your best intentions to work ahead and especially never to leave the blog until the end of the night.
But you made a commitment, and so you sit down, reluctantly, to scratch out a little something about writing for the sake of extending a writing streak.
“This is the 1,215th day in a row that I have posted something here — three years, three months, 28 days,” you write. “And isn’t that something?”
And you realize, why, yes, it is something, isn’t it? After decades of writing intermittently and thinking how good it must be to develop a regular writing habit, you did it. You’ve been writing and posting something here every day for so long it’s second nature to write something, anything.
You know there will be days that you write something more interesting or thought-provoking or entertaining, because you’ve already had days like that. You know there will be days when you come up with three and four and a half-dozen blog posts, because you’ve had those, too.
In short, if you follow through on a commitment long enough, the days when the words barely trickle out don’t trouble you all that much, because you’ve also had days when the floodgates open.
And so you write a few words about not having much to write about today, and you sleep well, looking forward to what you will write next.