Daily Habits

Welcome back to the second post, where I try to chronicle my efforts to break into the comic industry.

In this post, I’m going to talk about my daily writing habits.  Two major influences on me developing these daily writing habits are Steven Pressfield’s book the “War of Art” and Stephen King’s “On Writing.”

Since reading these books, I have committed to a daily writing habit.  It started off small with year one at least one comic page per day.  Then into year two, I upped it to least two pages per day. I am now into year three and over 800 days in a row, I do a least four comics pages per day.

I have added brainstorming to my daily writing habit where I do two characters, two environments, and two plots.  These are great to scroll through if I feel stuck and need a little bit to get started (I have accumulated over 1,200 of each) .  I also do one pitch for a comics character every day.  I can’t really share these, as comics companies and creators don’t want to open themselves up to claims of stealing ideas, so I am sitting on these, in hopes that if I ever get a chance to pitch, I have a backlog of ideas ready to go.

I do have a prose project in the works, and I try to write 500 plus words everyday, but I have to admit, I don’t always hit that (especially when the day job exhausts me).  But small goals like 500 words per day add up, and I am nearing the mid way point of my planned 50,000 word novel.

Two recently daily goals are a story arc everyday.  I hope this will help me with outlining, which I need to get better about.  I also do a daily drawing, which often turns into an inking practice of a comics pros pencils.

These things keep me going, and I feel like my writing is improving because of them.

Hopefully all of these daily habits improve me skills at writing and creating, and give me a collection of materials to pull from if I ever get the chance in the comics industry.

So that’s all for now. I’ll be back next week, where I will discuss podcasting (if you want to check out my podcast it’s called “Constructing Comics”. I  co-host with Noah Ray who I have worked of a few comics with).

 

Thanks for taking the time to check out the blog.

Matt