Six Months of a Weekly Writing Habit

In March I decided to write one page every Friday that wasn't for anyone. No client, no pitch, no pretending it might become something. A page for the sake of the page. It's now September, I've done twenty-four of the twenty-six Fridays, and I want to say what actually happened before I start telling it more neatly than it was.

Month one: the easy glow

The first four weeks were easy in a way I didn't trust. The novelty did the work. I wrote about a neighbour's cat, about a bad haircut, about the sound of the stairwell. I'd finish, close the notebook, and feel faintly smug for the rest of the day.

I should have been suspicious. Anything that feels this good in week two is borrowing from week twelve.

Month three: the slump

Around the middle of May, the pages turned flat. I was writing "I'm not sure what to say today" at the top and then saying it for forty minutes. Two Fridays in a row I wrote almost nothing and was irritated for the whole weekend.

This is the point where a habit either gets a rule or dies. Mine got a rule.

The rule

The rule is: one page, any page, and the page may be bad. That's all. I wrote it on the inside cover. A page of complaining counts. A page copying out a paragraph I admire counts, though I try not to do it more than once in a row. A page describing the tea in front of me counts.

I thought permission to be bad would produce a lot of bad pages, and it did. It also produced the only three pages I've been tempted to show anyone, because I'd stopped trying to impress a reader who wasn't there.

The two I missed

I skipped one Friday in June because of a deadline and one in August because I was away, and the notebook looked at me about it. What I did not do was double up the following week to catch up. A missed page stays missed. The gap goes in the notebook as a blank line with the date, and I carry on.

I used to think a missed day meant the streak was over. It turns out a streak was never the point. A habit that survives a gap is a better habit than a streak that's never been tested.

What it changed, and what it didn't

It didn't make me faster at client work. My invoices are the same size. It didn't give me a great idea, though a couple of small ones wandered in uninvited.

What it did was give my Fridays a shape. By the afternoon I've already written something, so the rest of the day isn't spent resenting the one thing I haven't done. I send the emails, hang the washing, go for the walk. The page is a quiet debt I've paid early.

Six months in, I've filled roughly half a notebook with pages that nobody needs. I'm oddly proud of it. Week twenty-seven is this morning's page, which I'll write once this one is posted.