Just Fifteen Minutes

A little over a year ago, sick of trying and failing to maintain the 'ideal writing routine', I gave myself a daily goal so easy I'd have to try harder to fail than to succeed at it. Write for 15 minutes every day.

That was it. Fifteen sustained, focused minutes. I even pulled out my trusty phone timer and timed myself so I knew exactly when I'd done my quota and was off the hook.

The first time took some doing, though. When I tell you the resistance had built up, whoa baby, I am not kidding. I'd entered that dark, constrained place every writer probably knows all too well, where the fear of writing badly completely overwhelmed the ability to write anything at all. When I started this, I'd come off of two years of no writing at all, and that was certainly part of why even the 15 minutes I'd internally set on doing took me over a week to sit down and get over the fear enough to just start.

When I did, I worked on the current Vocal Plus prompt- a goal for the new year. I figured this was a good place to start- just ramble about all the stuff crowding my head, about the relentless cycle I'd become stuck in and my idea that setting the bar low (dropping it on the floor, even) might jolt me into at least some form of productivity in my writing life again. The initial paralysis was insane, but I forced myself past it eventually, set a timer and wrote.

The time went really quickly. At the end of it, I kind of sat there blinking, like, that's it?? This is what I was so afraid of? I felt undeniably accomplished, but I also felt like maybe it was too easy. After all, 15 minutes a day seemed too meager to make much progress at all. I started thinking, change the goal. Make it bigger. Do thirty minutes.

Nope. I had committed to fifteen. Fifteen was the rule. I could go above if I felt like it that day, but nothing more was required. The next day, I came back to my typewriter with the same sense of resistance despite how easy it had been the day before. And the next, and the one after that. When I'd finished a rough draft of the writing goal stuff, I started something else.

My mileage varied, of course, as the small habit stacked. Sometimes I stopped at 15 minutes. Other days I'd write a lot longer, up to an hour. Some days, I got maybe 250 words. Sometimes I got up to a thousand or more. But I didn't force it- if I sensed a good place to stop and pick up the next day, I'd do that.

To get an idea where I was coming from: for years before this, I'd written sporadically, intensely, or not at all. I'd start a year resolving to stick to a goal like writing 1,000 words a day, every day, and then become demotivated and spiral when I didn't succeed or missed a single day. Other writers did it- some wrote even more prolifically- so why couldn't I? November would come around and find me with hardly any new material to my name. I'd jump on NaNo with a desperation to prove to myself I could commit to something. I'd write 50K in one month, and I got almost a high out of the success at the end. But immediately after, I would crash. The momentum was just not something I could sustain. And I'd think, okay I'll take December off and then plan the perfect writing routine for the coming new year- I'll be incredibly prolific. I'll make every month a 50k month. After all, I did it before, so I can do it again, right? Lather. Rinse. REPEAT.

Fifteen minutes is nothing in the great scheme of things, and I started to realize I had little pockets of 15 minutes everywhere- my lunch break at work was half an hour - enough to fit my writing in if I needed to. Even on a busy day, the likelihood that I couldn't find quarter hour somewhere to jot down some rough thoughts or additions on whatever I was working on at the time was next to zero. Gone was the resistance that came from making myself do an hour here, 1k there. When the starting goal was so small, the excuses became a whole lot less viable.

As for what I wrote about? That’s where Vocal became extremely instrumental.

The Vocal challenges gave me something to engage with on days where I didn't know which direction to go when getting my writing muse back. Some of the prompts were challenging, or not something I would have tried writing about if I hadn't been prompted. But I told myself I'd try to write something for each challenge as they came up, and I did- sometimes surprising myself with what I had to say. I told myself if I hated the end result, there was no reason I needed to post it- and though I have a couple drafts like this, most things I was able to whip into an agreeable shape.

Vocal's challenges also gave me deadlines to work towards. Deadlines are something I absolutely thrive with- and there was the added motivation of potentially winning money. It really helped me feel not only like I knew what to write, but that I was writing toward something. And the instant gratification that came from posting about a piece a week was another really motivating piece. Seeing the number of stories I'd written slowly climb through the year as well as the list of achievements on my author page (!), was so rewarding. That and the community aspect of Vocal- the comments and feedback- helped to make getting back into writing again feel a little less like it was happening in a void. It helped make my movement, however slow, visible.

Sitting down to write for just fifteen minutes was a small win in the truest sense of the words, but after two whole years of excruciating writer's block, it felt big, and my yearly word count? Benefited greatly from this. As opposed to the average year where I write not much more overall than the guilty 50k in a single month, in 2025, I wrote a cumulative 183,000 words (that's over 3 times more!) Considering on the average day I wrote maybe a few hundred words, this truly stunned me. I guess slow and steady might actually win the race.

Of all the things I've tried for my writing routine, this low-stakes, bite-at-a-time thing is the only thing that's stuck. I'm still doing it now- after work, tired, but committing to stopping by the library and sitting for 15 minutes (I've been here 26 now) to write a few words. It's not new advice- it's the kind of thing you hear all the time, in multiple different versions. But damn it, there’s a reason it’s so common.

As Stephen King (the GOAT) once said:

"When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, One word at a time.'"

Or, in this case, fifteen minutes.

(a/n: If you're interested in more stats on the totality of everything I wrote last year, check out this summation of my writing year.)