Sitting down to write can challenge your whole purpose for being, challenge your dreams. No doubts about that.

Getting those words down is food for the soul but it is more than that. All the while you are writing you can see yourself holding the Nobel Prize for Literature, or making it on to the Best Sellers List or getting the blockbuster movie deal. That is the dream. We never want to risk losing our dream because what do we replace it with if it becomes lost to us? Or worse, if we achieve it!

It is not a problem unique to writers, this self sabotage.

There are so many inspirational true life stories out there about how others have faced the loss of their big dream, or found a new one to follow when they have achieved it. We don’t have to reinvent the process, we only have to realise that it applies to writers too!

Just get down one word at a time. Begin. Write hard. Celebrate the small dreams along the way while keeping an eye out for the big one.

Perhaps the way is a ‘list’ of small dreams, that build on each other but also intersect, rather than just one big dream?

• Real Life Inspirations (or expert dream changers?)

• More About Goals

Habits can be productive but they can also be tiresome. They can provide us with the ready excuse of ‘missed the usual time to begin so no point in starting now’.

I read somewhere, way too long a time ago, that it is healthy to change your habits from time to time. Small changes, tea instead of coffee, shower after breakfast instead of before, turn left instead of right when taking the dog out, catch a different train. Just for one day, if only once a day, every day change just one thing in your routine.

Writing, constantly and consistently, invariably implies a habit. But we can write anywhere, anytime, if we want. So when does the habit become a hindrance instead of a help? Well, I need a change so that I can get my productive writing habit back.

So, I am trying out blogging. It is writing, just not writing a short word story. It is a start, the rest will come and short word story writing habits will be formed again (hopefully).

In this spirit today I am also making another a questionable, small change in habit. I am not having a coffee until it is done.

Let the blogging begin, let the coffee flow, let the short word stories come.

Rest assured that I will be starting with coffee again tomorrow, some other habit must change!

• Interesting Quotes on Habits from Writers (and others of renown)