by Chris McGinty
Chris McGinty is a blogger who hates streak habits. He wakes up on the first Sunday of the 2024 knowing that he has written one complete work of fiction for the first six days of the year. He can conceivably continue this habit, or he can let it go, because there’s maybe better things to do with his time. But there isn’t really. Writing is the thing he truly enjoys. If he could only choose one thing to build his career around it would be that.
He thinks for a minute. He could write another lackluster flash fiction piece with no real plot or stakes. He could watch some TV and call in to his job. He could quit his job. He could just do what the man wants him to do and follow orders for a productive and peaceful society. And that’s ultimately what he decides, to do what society expects of him. He jerks off, gets a shower, and goes to work to contribute to the GDP of the USA.
It’s just that after he’s done with all of that, he realizes that it isn’t the potential of a streak habit that is at fault. It’s the fact that after posting his last story to the blog, he could have started on the next one and written something worth reading. If he’d done that then he wouldn’t be facing writing more garbage to fulfill some idealistic goal that he maybe should have never thought of in the first place.
It’s the motivation behind the thought that seems important though. It is about building the habit of starting and finishing projects. It isn’t about producing good work. Ninety percent of what he writes in a normal week isn’t good. This is no different. This just involves posting the bad work to the internet for everyone to see, because to post it requires finishing it, so what better way to build the habit of finishing stories.
So what to do? He could forget the whole thing, but he still plans to write every day, so why forget about building the habit of finishing? And that follows that the option of just quitting writing altogether is also not on the table. He could write a blog post explaining the goal and explaining that it’s fine to miss a day. It’s not specifically that he plans to write and post a story every day, but that he plans to write 366 in 2024, and getting behind is dangerous to that kind of goal. Still, he could take Sundays off and claim it’s for football and/or religion that he needs a day of rest. The options are a plenty.
That’s not what’s going to happen, and he knows it. He’s instead going to go to work and in those moments of downtime he’s going to do what he often does. He’s going to get some writing done. Sure, normally it’s just taking notes to deal with later, but today can be different. Today, he can just write his story for the day. He can continue the streak habit he hates and finish a story.
Not just any story though. This one will be a self-referential, fourth wall breaking, self-insert about how he needed to write a story to meet some arbitrary deadline for some arbitrary goal. Even better, it will be titled and start out referencing the most thing most central to identifying his ATW blog postings as a way of calling back his past writing. And with that said…
Chris McGinty is a blogger who hates streak habits…