5 Habits of Great Writers To Help You Organize Yourself Better

Self-organization for a writer is the cornerstone that depends not only on the creative process but also on the personal qualities of the author.

Sometimes it can be challenging to focus on work, begin writing, and organize your workspace. However, various writers solved this problem with the help of a few valuable habits.

Habit 1. Keep notebooks and personal diaries

Writing down everything that comes to mind or catches your attention is a useful habit.

Because when you write down your thoughts, you inevitably come to conclusions, gain deeper insights, and accumulate a lot of images, phrases, and impressions that you can rely on later.

For example, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky became famous for their diaries; Chekhov and Gogol became famous for their travel notes and sentimental observations.

Habit 2. Collect favorite quotes

Remember Oscar Wilde, the dashing playwright, and poet who made the entire world laugh with his fairy tales and marvel at his aphorisms?

As readers and writers, we take inspiration and feel moved by reading other people’s work. So, saving quotes is essential to our reading and writing experience.

A good quote can have a significant impact on our writing. It can inspire us, provide us with new insights, and encourage us to think from new angles.

It’s truly amazing how one quote can be so powerful.

If you want to avoid wasting time by writing down quotes, there is one excellent reading app — Basmo. It allows you, among other things, to save your favorite passages. It has a scanning feature to extract the text you want to save, which you can later format as you see fit.

Habit 3. Use flashcards

Writing down your thoughts or fragments of the plot on sticky notes or cards does wonders.

It helps you build associations, and you can combine the pieces together as you please to see what will work best.

For example, Vladimir Nabokov actively used this method: he wrote on separate cards in thin boxes. This unusual approach made it possible for him to write scenes inconsistently and change their places at will.

He also kept lined sheets of paper under his pillow to write down ideas that suddenly came to mind.

Habit 4. Develop a system

The author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, used a color coding system. And he was principled in choosing colors for his work. Interesting, right?

The genius Dumas has used different colors for different genres for decades: for example, blue for fictional novels, pink for articles and non-fiction, and yellow for poetry.

This technique helped him organize his writing and clearly express his thoughts and ideas in his work.

Habit 5. Stick to a writing schedule

Ray Bradbury, for example, developed the habit of writing a story a day at a young age.

This helped him become a prolific writer and write many collections of wonderful, unique stories and later novels. Daily writing is a great habit, and it takes a lot of effort to instill it.

However, if that’s not working for you, it’s better to save your nerves and work at your own pace. But the only thing to keep in mind is to be consistent and show up each time according to your own schedule.

Final words

Habits are necessary to achieve long-term results in whatever we do, so the same applies to writing.

We can find guidance and inspiration by following the examples of great writers, but the most important thing is to recognize what is working for you and what is not.

Only then can you adjust pieces of advice to suit your needs and develop your own habits to help you navigate the writing world and gain a foothold in the writer’s chair.

After all, writing has to make you feel good to keep your creative juices flowing.