Do you want to be a writer? Be a writer every day! Set a goal on the number of words you want to write and DO IT. If you need support with that, try writer-word-goals.

I like to write. It is something that I enjoy. It also allows my thoughts to reach more people that I could ever meet in person. Most of my writing effort goes into making what I think as clear as possible to my readers. This because I try to share things that are beneficial to them. Naturally I test these on myself first.

One thing that bugs me as a writer is my lack of consistency. I typically write when I like it. I keep track of a list of topics I want to write about, but I have always kept the when and how malleable.

Lately I have been wondering if this is a smart thing to (not) do.

In general you can find cases of geniuses that can run a marathon or produce an incredible work of art without practice. Well, from a range of activities that I do (from bread making to writing) I carefully tested that I am outside that small set of people. So as any other common mortal I need to try, fail and fail better. The problem is that I need to do it a lot of times to really catch up with the geniuses (and overcome them if they keep skipping practice)! And the only better tool than quantity that I am aware of is constancy.

And I asked myself: can my editor help me with that?

I had these ideas lurking in my head from some weeks when I started taking this course by Walter Mosley. This person is inspiring. What touched me is that he decided to become a writer because in the eyes of his society he was already a failure. Then he managed to get there by his grit.

Even watching just the little sample of the class you get his pearl: write every day and, before writing, edit the work of the previous day. Then just keep going. Forever. Likely, you will become a professional writer because of compounding. He also suggests the amount of words: one thousands word per day.

This resonated with my beliefs in habits. Assuming that you have a way to tell yourself to do something everyday, I can show you how to customize Emacs to be your coach while you are running towards completing your thousand words mini-marathon.

I wrote a few lines of Elisp to change Emacs in your writing coach: you tell your editor your goal for the current buffer, and Emacs will quietly ping you every quarter of a minute with encouragement for your progress until you are in the buffer.

The idea behind this is to make our writing process a bit of a game: I want to see that I am succeeding towards my writing goal while I am doing it.

I initially thought to show a progress bar ¹, but then I thought: worse is better ²! While I am writing this, Emacs has just printed a message Okay! 328 words left. which tells me that I am rather close to my goal. I am going to edit this blog, so I may end up cutting or/and adding some content, but as a first go I find it supporting to see the count going down. It just makes me feel good and enjoy the writing session even more.

You can try my mode by just downloading (or copying) the code from https://github.com/ag91/writer-word-goals.

This little mode is so simple that the only customization I left to the user is wwg/monitor-period. This defines how often Emacs notifies you about progress. I tuned this to 15 seconds according to my tastes. Potentially you can also customize the logic of the counter by modifying wwg/monitor-function, for example to make it fitter to the kind of file you are editing. I write in plain text formats, so keywords do not bias the word count. If you are editing LaTex files or similar, where keywords are everywhere, the bias can be significant. Then you may really want to provide a more sophisticated value for wwg/monitor-function.

The only curious feature of this mode is that Emacs becomes silent if you move to another buffer. Maybe you got caught in something urgent and you will likely dislike it, if your minibuffer is getting polluted unnecessarily. Hence, I have fleshed out a bit of buffer management so that if you wish to run multiple goals at the same time for the current Emacs session, you are free to challenge yourself.

Are you or do you wish to be a writer then? No matter how good you are, some practice is necessary. And the more you are consistent the more incredible will be your progress. If you want a bit of support in your endeavour, grab my writer-word-goals and run wwg/set-goal-current-buffer to set your own goal. Or follow Walter Mosley's advice and just run wwg/set-1k-goal-current-buffer, which will set your goal to one thousand words.

Happy writing!