Hey, don't give up on that dream. You can write a book. You're only a want-a-writer if you fall into the trap of believing that. And there's nothing wrong with wanting something.
I often find that if I'm not making any progress in a given area I'm practicing, a change in process helps. There are at least two components to skill: practice and strategy. Strategy is what you choose to practice, and skill can't be had without both. If you find your practice ineffective, what's probably needed is a change in strategy.
If you want to write a book, then perhaps a revision of "don't break the chain" is in order: If your writing wasn't coherent, practice making it coherent. One idea would be to devote each week to writing a different chapter of your book. That way, you're still writing every day, but the focus changes each week, so that if you're unhappy with the current week's output, you have a higher chance of feeling better about next week. I realize it's hard to write a book in a nonlinear fashion (earlier chapters guide later chapters, almost by definition, so it's tempting to try to perfect each chapter before moving onto the next) but the goal is to practice writing a book, not to write a good book on your first try. Forcing yourself to hammer out a chapter per week will bring coherence, if not quality. But quality is simply a matter of practice, so keep at it!
I have to agree. I always want to start a somewhat personal blog, but I can't think of many topics. My thoughts are often half-baked, not very original and once I wrote them down, they tend to be obsolete again, more or less.
I never got paid for writing directly, but then I figured that in a certain way, I am already a writer. Because I write articles for my business and they make me money. I didn't rank for a certain keyword two years ago. Then I ranked. I have this little code snippet that checks which landing page converted to paying users and I figured that my writing made me a lot of money, because Google is a major traffic source. So this one article took me 10 hours to write and made me 5,000€ so far.
Odd, isn't it? I can't think of stuff to write about personally, but I do make money with writing indirectly through my business.
That is why I use beeminder to track the things I want to do. I get really nerdy looking graphs and if I don't follow through with my goals I have to pay them money, which is a nice way to check if I really don't see the value in what I am doing, or if I just don't want to do it that day.
I gain no financial benefit from this endorsement, I just really like their service.
I use it as a brain dump to think about what I want to write, and it seems to work. I write better when I have a decent plan about what I want to write, and I use 750 words to work through that plan. At 10-11 minutes for an entry, it's not a big commitment and it pays large dividends. That said, writing at 750words.com for me is different than "real" writing.
I used 750words for almost a year but ultimately stopped by accident and have not been back since.
The "do not break the chain" mechanism kept me going, but there were days when I had trouble filling out the word count.
In the end I stopped, because it was a hassle and I did not see myself progressing in skill.
Maybe if you have a clear goal in mind like writing a book with at least some outline then it would make sense to write every day.
As I was writing mostly random thoughts similar to most blog posts, there was little coherence in the big picture.
I suppose I was just a want-a-writer having had visions of writing a book since the age of five.