: Re: How much time do you find you have to commit to daily writing to see results? I've wanted to publish a book for a long time (since I was 10 or 11), but never bothered to do any serious

@Mendez196

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Water Mosley, in This Year You Write Your Novel, insists that you must write every day. Not just to make progress, but also to keep yourself inside "the dream of your story," so that regular exposure to the story keeps it working in your unconscious even when you're not consciously working on it. To me, this means that you shouldn't skip a day, even if you don't have time to "settle in".

He doesn't seem to recommend a word goal, but a time goal, "not less than an hour and a half" and he notes that some days you may produce nothing. I'd say that if you can't do the hour and a half, pick another number, but I agree that there's value in doing it every single day.

Do you have spare moments when you're playing on your phone? My novel is on my phone, in Scrivener. If I'm waiting for the streetcar for ten minutes, or at an airplane gate, or even in line at the grocery, I'll tend to open Scrivener and tap at the scene I'm currently working on. I can't always manage to write new material this way, but I can tweak and edit that current scene, and it also keeps me inside the story.

My personal goals are (1) do something in the novel every day and (2) finish one scene every three days. (And I don't get credit for extras--if I finish two scenes in three days, the next one is "due" within three days of the moment that I finished the second one.)

That works for me. The goal should be to find something that works for you in producing steady, if slow, progress.

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