The 5 steps to being a prolific writer

How I’m writing more this year than ever before.

If you want to be a great writer, there’s only one way to get to that level, and that’s to write a lot.

I’ve written eight novels and four novellas over the past twelve years, and my goal this year is to write more than ever before.

I’m going to share with you my simple tactics for being a prolific writer. By the end, you’ll be equipped with methods to write more than you previously thought possible, without burning out or overworking yourself.

Even if you’re not a writer, these five steps can be applied to nearly anything you want to do more of this year.

Why You Should Be Prolific

Okay, but first of all—why is it important to be prolific? What makes that a better goal than simply spending a year writing one great story?

It may sound counterintuitive, but working for a long time on one project might not improve your skills as much as spending the same amount of time completing several different projects. There’s a famous anecdote about a pottery class that demonstrates this fact. The class was split into two groups. One group was to focus on quality, the other on quantity. On the final day of class, the teacher graded the results, and found that all the highest-quality pieces were produced by the quantity group.

Why? By constantly iterating and learning with each successive project, the quantity-focused students improved their skills far faster than their quality-focused peers who spent all their time on a single piece. Producing a large amount of work means you get to throw more stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It compresses the feedback cycle so you can much more quickly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as an artist.

This is one of the reasons it’s usually a good idea to write a lot of short stories before attempting to write a novel.

Now, being a prolific writer doesn’t mean you have to exclusively work on short projects. Really, it just means writing a lot of words, and that can include writing novels.

If you look at the highest achievers in almost any field, but especially in writing, you’ll find that most of them were far more prolific than their peers. They may only be remembered for one or two great books, but it often took a tremendous amount of output and experimentation to advance their skills to the level where they could write those masterpieces. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, and so many other literary legends wrote dozens or even hundreds of books.

The idea of being a reclusive writer who only releases one great book every five or ten years is appealing, at least to me, but it’s important to recognize that you can’t get to that point until you’ve mastered the craft. And to master the craft, you first need to write a lot of stories. You can’t skip the chapter of prolific experimentation to get to the chapter of mastery.

And look, if you’re anything like me, focusing on prolific output isn’t the most natural thing in the world. Part of me wants to spend ages perfecting everything I write, revising and polishing for months or even years before moving on to the next project. But especially as a young artist—really, as anyone who wants to develop their skills quickly—the most important thing is producing a lot of work. Experimenting. Putting yourself out there, trying new things, and making creativity habitual. This isn’t to say that quality doesn’t matter. The whole point here is that quantity leads to quality.

Being prolific doesn’t just advance your skills. It also vastly increases your surface area for luck. The more books you write, the better the chance that one of them will be a bestseller. The more work you put out there, the better the chance that something will resonate with the right people. This is especially important if you want a career in writing. Yes, a lot of your success is luck-dependent, but every piece of work you produce is another ticket for the lottery. Luck favors the prolific.

Now let’s get practical. Here’s how to be a prolific writer in 5 simple steps.

Tactics to Be Prolific

1. Set constraints.

If your approach to writing a lot is telling yourself, “I’m going to write five books a year for the rest of my life!”… don’t expect it to end well.

Yes, your ultimate dream may be to write prolifically across the span of your entire life, but such an open-ended goal is overwhelming and hard to measure. Instead, set a period for prolific work, like the next twelve months, and reevaluate at the end. Treat that length of time like an experiment. Reflect on what you learned from it, and adjust your approach accordingly for the next twelve months, or however long. Most good goals have time constraints, even if the long-term aim is to establish a habit for life.

It’s important to remember that life moves in seasons. There may come a time when life circumstances make it difficult or impossible to write a lot every day. You also have natural rhythms as an artist that should be integrated into your approach to writing. You might find that writing every day isn’t right for you. But you’ll only know for sure after trying it out for a certain length of time.

Set time constraints for your experiments in prolific writing, and you’ll be less overwhelmed and better able to learn what works and what doesn’t in your approach.

2. Start simple.

Don’t burn yourself out quickly. Sustainability is essential if you want to be prolific for longer than a few days.

Set an achievable goal; aim low to begin with. Whatever your metric, whether it’s words written or stories finished, your target number should push your limits, but not tip into the realm of impossibility.

I’m aiming to write half a million words this year. I was thinking about aiming for a million, but since my annual output has never reached a third of that, five hundred thousand seemed like a more achievable goal. It’s a challenge, but not such an intimidating one.

Especially in the beginning, it’s important to build flexibility into your rules. For instance, I’m counting journaling, video script writing, and fiction writing in my total word count. That means if I don’t meet my goal in one department, I can make up for it in another.

Start simple, and you can always add rules or increase your target later. Start complicated, and you’ll quickly burn out.

3. Make the time to write.

Because if you don’t make the time, you probably won’t find the time.

Carve out time to write in your calendar, and protect it with your life. Maybe that’s a bit much, but you get the point.

Think about when in the week you can write. This may require cutting out time spent on social media or entertainment. But we’re not here to mess around—we’re here to write, and that takes time. Sacrifices must be made.

Don’t think that you have to find five-hour chunks of time to write. You can be a prolific writer by writing in bits and pieces. Ten minutes of downtime can be turned into ten minutes of working on your story. Your commute can be time to jot down ideas and observations. Countless writers have written books in small increments, finding ways to squeeze writing between other commitments.

Making writing a daily habit will go a long way in ensuring prolific output. Like I said before, when you’re starting out with a new goal or habit, stay flexible and aim low. Better to write a little every day than write a lot every once in a while. It’s like building a muscle. Focus on consistency over intensity.

4. Keep your why in mind.

Presumably, you don’t want to be a writer just because you picked that from a list of activities at random. So what’s driving you to do this? Because the answer will be essential to keeping you on track when the going gets tough.

If you want to be prolific, you’ll need to write on some days when you really don’t feel like writing. Your why will serve as a guiding light on those days.

This isn’t just about knowing why you want to be a writer; it’s also about knowing why you want to be a prolific writer. The reasons might be similar, but not quite the same. A dedication to being prolific speaks to a drive greater than that of a casual hobbyist. Maybe you want to write a lot so you can improve faster in your craft. Maybe you want to write a lot so you have more chances of getting something published. Maybe you want to write a lot because you have a ton of ideas bouncing around in your head. Whatever your why is, discover it and keep it central as you write.

The human mind can do incredible things if it’s driven by a sense of purpose. The more intrinsic and personal, the better.

On a smaller scale, you should also know the why behind the individual projects you’re working on. Writing stories you’re not passionate about is a great way to quickly run out of steam.

Know why you want to be a prolific writer, and why what you’re writing matters to you, and you’ll know why you should persevere day after day.

5. Make it fun.

If you want to write a lot, you need to enjoy writing. There are a lot of things about writing that are inherently fun—we literally get to turn fictional stories we imagine into books we can share with other people. But there are ways to make the process even more fun.

You can gamify your writing. I’ve set a daily word count goal, and every day I can see what percentage of that goal I’ve written. It’s exciting every time I hit a number higher than 100%.

You can customize your writing environment. If you have the space, set aside a specific area for writing. I have a themed writing nook in my room, which is kind of overkill, but it does get me in the mood to write.

You can listen to specific music when you write. Turning it on can serve as a trigger to get you in the right headspace. I’m prolific at creating playlists, so I have one for every story and kind of project I’ve written. Sometimes, I have specific playlists for certain characters or types of scenes.

You can try writing challenges to keep you on your toes. Try to write a certain amount of words in five minutes, or find a random prompt to use as the basis of a short story, or attempt to emulate the style of a writer you like. Remember, not everything you write needs to be published some day. Some writing can just be for fun. The more you write and the more you experiment, the better equipped you be to write something great that does get published.

Improperly managed, attempting to be prolific can be exhausting. Properly managed, done sustainably, creativity becomes a flywheel, a perpetual inspiration machine. If you set constraints, start simple, make the time to write, keep your why in mind, and make it fun, you’ll find it hard not to be prolific.

---

You can watch the video version of this post here. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

---

My latest work

I’ve stepped back from working on videos this month to focus on writing Catalyst of Control. I’m making good progress, and I can’t wait to share the book with you later this year.

---

Recommendations

• Listen: The soundtrack of Interstellar by Hans Zimmer. I got to see him live in concert this month, which was fantastic—I’ve been a fan for many years, and listened to many of his film scores while writing my books.

• Read: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. A series of reviews of various aspects of life on earth, from sunsets to the game “Monopoly” to the World’s Largest Ball of Paint, woven together in a fascinating blend of humor and memoir and philosophical contemplation.

• Watch: A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. I attended a screening and Q&A with Eisenberg earlier this month, my second time seeing the film. It explores difficult themes of pain and loss through a nuanced, and often unexpectedly humorous, lens.