# 3 Quiet Habits That Helped Me Write a 70,000-Word Book Alongside My 9–5

![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Eve Arnold]]
- Full Title: 3 Quiet Habits That Helped Me Write a 70,000-Word Book Alongside My 9–5
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://medium.com/swlh/3-quiet-habits-that-helped-me-write-a-70-000-word-book-alongside-my-9-5-a448555d42b8

## Highlights
- 1. Start with something
- , I knew starting with nothing was a recipe for disaster. You spend more time trying to search your thoughts for a half-decent one than you do writing.
- A book is never going to be written if all you do is think.
- you need a process that makes life as frictionless as possible
- 2. Hard on the system, easy on myself
- Writing online teaches you a tonne of stuff, one of the biggest lessons for me is that human beings default to their systems.
- We fall or rise to the strength of our systems.
- I knew this from trying and failing to consistently put out content. After a year or so I found a system that worked for me. I swapped out article writing for writing my book. It was that simple.
- 3. Stopped zooming out
- There were moments when I’d catch myself thinking about the scale of the thing ahead of me and it made me feel sick.
- Writing a book, a decent-sized book, it’s a humungous task. If you look at it from too far away you’ll never start and even if you do start, you’ll never finish. It’s too intimidating