February 6th 2023 - Stacking a new poetry habit

One of my favourite podcasts started up with its second season this month. The Bricklane Bookshop Podcast features a different writer in each episode who reads from one of their short stories and then discusses the story and the wider short story form.

This episode featured Manuel Muñoz and the one bit of advice I took from him was to start reading poetry as early as possible in your writing career. Poetry is something I've always struggled to engage with consistently but have enjoyed when I have. I often fall into the trap of trying to do too much at once. So instead, this time, I'm going to try stacking a poetry habit on top of my showing up at my desk habit.

Habit stacking is essentially where you rely on the success of one habit to create another habit which directly follows it, creating a routine of sorts. So once I'm done at my desk each morning (whether I've written anything or not) I'm now going to kick off the day with a single poem. 1 poem a day still means 365 poems a year and that's 365 more than I'm currently reading...

I'm 3 days into this habit and so far enjoying it. I have plenty of poetry in the house too so there's no need to rush out a buy a load of new books I don't have space or money for.