I’ve been trying to start this habit for AGES. Everyone who works and has kids seems to swear by waking up in the wee hours of the morning and getting their writing done before anyone else is up. They make the sacrifice to go to bed earlier, or simply give up some of their sleep, so they can devote time to their writing.

It sounds like a good solution, right? If life is busy and there’s no time for pursuing one’s creative work during the day or evening, then get up before dawn and do the work then. Simple. Effective. Before you know it, you’ve written a novel in your little early morning productivity hour.

Except, I have always struggled with this strategy. I can train myself to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier (or, as often happens, sacrifice my sleep), but what I cannot do is form coherent, interesting, or evocative sentences in the pre-dawn hours. I just can’t. My brain doesn’t have any thoughts or ideas that early in the morning. 6:00 a.m. is for shaking the fuzz out of my head, not for making up stories.

And if I wasn’t going to be an early morning writer, then I’d have to be a night time writer, slinking down to the computer after putting the kids to bed and trying to plunk out a few plot points before exhaustion claimed me. But that’s just it: by the time night rolls around I’m EXHAUSTED and cannot form many coherent thoughts either.

I know this sounds like a lot of whining, but there’s a somewhat happy ending here. You see, today, I tried again with the morning writing thing. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. and headed down to the writing computer, and I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything else but write fiction. No writer’s notebook. No reading. No nothing. Just plunk those keys to make some sentences and write the next line in the story. I was going to force myself to write, and by some kind of miracle, I did! I wrote about 800 words in a little less than an hour.

Now, this was just one day, and one day doesn’t make a pattern or a habit. But I figure if I keep doing this every day, if I keep forcing myself to write (even if the writing is crap-ay), then over time, my mind and body will be trained to associate early morning wake ups with heading down to the computer to write.

This kind of pattern/habit building happened to me recently with my back injuring in late December. I was in so much pain (mostly down my leg due to my nerve being pinched) that the only relief I could get was to walk slowly around the house. I had to do — I mean I HAD to do it or I would be in excruciating pain — and because I did it every day without fail when I woke up in the morning, I started doing it automatically. Alarm goes off, do some stretches, roll out of bed, start walking. I used that walking time to listen the the Liturgy of the Hour, so that became part of my daily ritual as well.

And after fourteen weeks of waking up and walking around the house every dang morning, I find that I simply cannot start the day without doing it. My brain doesn’t even make the conscious decision anymore. I get out of bed and start walking. That’s just what I do.

I’m hoping to develop the same pattern/habit with my writing in the morning. Just like my walking, I don’t have to do it perfectly. Most of my morning walks are me hobbling along at a snail’s pace just to get my back and legs feeling normal again. It’s not pretty. But it doesn’t have to be pretty. The walking is what’s important, and the repetition that builds the habit.

So tomorrow, after I wake up and walk, I’ll head downstairs to the computer and start typing. I’ll write anything — a new short story, the continuation of an old one, the prologue to a novel, a random sentence in the middle of my work-in-progress — and I won’t think too hard or too much about it. I’ll just force myself to write, just like I had to force myself to walk despite the agonizing pain.

Knowing that I have to be a little hard on myself to keep the pattern going, it will be worth it if I can change this aspect of my writing process and work habits.

Today’s only the first day. Maybe after I’ve been at it for a week or two, I’ll revisit how this experiment is shaping up. I hope I can make it stick this time.