I’d always said this and I’d always made it a point to mention it here whenever someone asks about how to keep a daily writing habit going.

Input determines output. And for writing, I found that reading input determines my writing output. The quality of the stuff I read—social media, blogs, articles, books—has a strong correlation with the quality of my daily writing here, and the quality of the thinking behind the writing. Read inspiring, enriching, interesting, exciting, fun stuff, and the things I write here will come easily. It’s the whole loop that’s life-giving in itself, not just the writing. I read and consume a wholesome diet of ideas, thoughts and discussions. This uplifts my spirits, feeds my growth, and makes me want to express that, to create something in return. The writing is cathartic, a release, an act of creation, a ritual that gives back in gratitude to the original inspiration. 

The moment I get too busy, tired and tied down with other life stuff and de-prioritise reading, I struggle with writing here. It’s almost like eating junk food. Eat the wrong thing, and the body responds immediately to signal your mistake. You feel bloated and awful. Eat wholesome fresh foods, and your body sings. Likewise for my writing. 

And true enough, lately I’d been struggling with ideas of what to write here, exactly because of those reasons. I’m not spending one hour a day reading, as I used to. I’m busy doing life. And the same end result as it had always turned out– no inspiration, no juice, no words come out. A cursor blinking back at me while I stare at the blank page here. Yes, even after 400+ days of writing everyday, one can still experience stuff that folks just starting out here can experience. And I end up falling back to my old tactic–when uninspired, write about why or what made you uninspired. No shame there. And it’s a bit of meta-introspection about the state of my writing, and the lessons we keep coming back to relearn. Over and over, this same lesson comes back to school me hard.

If there was just one writing hack I can have, this would be it. That input shapes the output, consumption shapes production, reading quality determines writing quality.