I wrote a couple of novels, never got published though

For me, the big thing was participating in National Novel Writing Month. If you're not familiar, NaNoWriMo takes place in November, and it's a community where people get together to try writing a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. It's become pretty commercial now, but the key thing that seemed to keep people going was community and routine.

If you don't take any days off, that's 1667 words every day. That came out to about three pages in my word processor, and I thought three pages was pretty doable. The routine helped get over some writer's block I'd been struggling with, and it's something that has been repeated often as advice from famous authors.

Taking a day off made it a lot harder the next day. Not just for making up the word count, because I'd take a day off only if I was ahead of quota. But when your momentum comes to a rest it becomes a lot harder to kick off the motivation. So the trick if you want to do it is to do it, but then you gotta do it or you won't do it.

Another thing to keep in mind - your writing doesn't have to be good. In fact, it's pretty encouraged to spit out garbage if it keeps you writing because you can edit it later. If you edit as you go and try to skip the drafting process, it's like trying to do two things at once - both things suffer for it. In retrospect, editing was probably the more challenging part of writing.