Chris Fox - Lifelong Writing Habit: The Secret to Writing Every Day: Write Faster, Write Smarter

Contents

LIFELONG WRITING HABIT

Chris Fox

Copyright 2015 Chris Fox

All rights reserved.

ISBN:

ISBN-13:

To You, The Writer.

It's time to take it to the next level.

Introduction

If you're holding this book, I'm guessing you'd like to become more consistent in your writing. That's the devil a lot of us wrestle with, after all. Maybe you've cranked out a book. Maybe you've cranked out several. Wherever you are in your craft, you've probably had spurts of intense creativity (yay), but have also suffered from droughts where you simply cannot force your butt into the chair to write (boo).

I have good news. This book will teach you to write consistently, every day. No exceptions. You'll learn to harness the twin powers of discipline and motivation, both of which are required if you want to crank out the volume of work necessary to make a living as a writer.

Be warned, though. This book isn't a 'One Five Minute Tip' that will give you a magic bullet to transform you into Stephen King. Writing is hard work. Our craft takes time and dedication. It takes work. Lots and lots of work. I can give you the tools, but if you're not interested in working your ass off you should close this book and save yourself a few bucks.

If you are willing to do the work, though, this book will change your writing life forever. I'll show you how I went from writing a few hundred words every few weeks to consistently cranking out 5,000 every day. Follow the system I teach, and you'll be doing exactly the same thing, for the rest of your life.

I could go on and on for several more pages to pad the book, but your time is valuable. Let's rock.

For Those People Who Want To Know About the Author

To my surprise, I learned with 5,000 Words Per Hour that some people actually want to know a little bit about the person writing the books they read. That's not me. I prefer to get right into what the book can teach me without all the fluff, bragging, and all around BS from some pompous windbag author.

If you're like me this section will bore you, so skip to Chapter 1. If, on the other hand, you ARE curious, here's my story and why I'm qualified to teach you to install your lifelong writing habit.

My story began back in 2007 during the financial crisis. At the time I was an executive vice president for a mortgage bank. Don't let the fancy title fool you. It basically meant I was a sales manager for a fly-by-night lender. We were making money hand over fist, just like everyone else from 2003-2007.

One of my responsibilities was studying interest rates, so we could sell pools of mortgage loans to Wall Street, and I saw the crash coming before most people. I used the opportunity to move home to northern California, leaving Los Angeles behind. I was burnt out, exhausted, and just beginning the worst chapter of my life.

My life in Santa Rosa was dismal. I embraced my Lester Burnham moment, taking a job that paid $12 an hour for a local credit union. I didn't earn enough to make ends meet, and within a few months my savings were gone. Then the debt started to mount. My self-esteem was shot, and I quickly gained another forty pounds. Note that I was already morbidly obese, and this just made it worse.

I didn't date. Far from it. My perfect day was one where no one noticed me, and I was able to make it home without speaking to a single person. Once there I'd obliterate the pain and shame with a healthy dose of marijuana, and then I'd play World of Warcraft until I passed out. I was the epitome of the stoned slacker, a guy in his early thirties who had exactly nothing he could point to as an accomplishment. I had no decent job prospects, no college degree, and no marketable skills. I hadn't written in over five years, despite having had a number of short stories published.

This next paragraph is exactly the kind of pompous bragging I mentioned above, but hear me out. As you read it, remember that you and I are no different. Anything I've done, you can do too.

I'm now the lead software engineer at a San Francisco startup. I work with people with doctorates from Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. Yet I, the junior college dropout, am the highest paid person at the company. I've dropped over a hundred pounds and am dating the love of my life. In the last twelve months I've also published three novels and been on some of the largest writing podcasts in the world.

I'm debt free and on track to make a quarter of a million dollars in 2015. I've become an accomplished public speaker, and have learned a whole of host of skills I never expected. Recently I even hiked the John Muir Trail, a grueling high altitude trek through the Sierras.

So where am I going with this? As I was making those changes I developed a system, and you're holding that system in your hands right now. It's short, practical, easy to understand, and full of actionable steps. If you follow that system, there's no reason you can't accomplish everything I have and more.

Trust me when I say there is absolutely nothing special about me . I'm where I am simply because I started installing the right habits, exactly like you're about to do.

-Chris

Chapter 1- What is a habit?

Before we can begin building a habit, it's critical that you understand exactly what a habit is. Thanks to advances in neuroscience, we understand more than we ever have about habits, their creation, and how and when our brain accesses them. This study has been used by the advertising industry for decades to get you to buy everything from toothpaste to Febreze.

The good news is that you can harness the same techniques to get the same result. In essence, you'll be installing a habit in your brain just like you'd install the computer program you use to write.

Anatomy of a Habit

As mentioned above, a habit is very much like a computer program. That habit lives in a part of your brain called the basal ganglia, and it consists of three parts:

1- The Trigger

2- The Routine

3- The Reward

The Trigger is exactly what it sounds like, the event that triggers the habit. This varies from habit to habit, but every habit has one. You can confirm this by examining your own daily routine. What does your morning look like? Odds are good the alarm goes off at a specific time. That's a trigger. So is walking by Starbucks and smelling coffee.

The Routine is the meat of a habit. It's the 'what you do' part. When my alarm goes off I get out of bed, put in my contacts, and stumble off to the gym. What does your morning routine look like? Odds are good that it's the same on most days. Maybe you get up and have breakfast. Or flip on the TV. Or surf Reddit. Whatever you do, you probably do it consistently.

The Reward is the 'what you get out of it' part. In my case I get a rush of endorphins from working out, and I have the knowledge that I started off my day by getting stronger. I get to step on the scale and be happy with the number I see. If you stop by Starbucks the reward is the massive burst of sugar and caffeine.

Good Habits versus Bad Habits

Clearly not every habit is good for us. Some lead to us gaining weight. Some waste a colossal amount of time without giving us anything to show for it. Once upon a time I devoured everything in sight, which led to me topping the scale at 303 pounds. I spent all my free time playing video games and getting high.

Each of these habits had the same three parts, and all were ultimately motivated by the reward. This revelation was huge, because as a computer programmer I found myself asking the question that prompted me to write this book. What if I could modify my habits? What if it were possible to uninstall bad ones or to install new good ones?

Flipping a Habit

I started to experiment with my morning habit. The part that was making me gain weight was the routine. The trigger (the alarm) was just fine. The reward (feeling satiated and a sense of completion) didn't need to change. What did was the specific actions I took every morning. So I tried changing the routine without modifying either the trigger or the reward.