Every writer knows Stephen King's famous 2,000-words-a-day routine, but here's what most people miss: King doesn't just use this quota to generate content. He uses it as a consistency engine that forces plot problems to surface and resolve themselves naturally. When you commit to daily momentum, your brain stops letting you sidestep the logical gaps you'd otherwise paper over with clever prose.

I discovered this accidentally after spending three weeks "fixing" a plot hole in my thriller. I kept reworking the same chapter, making my detective's investigation more plausible. Then I got frustrated, said "screw it," and just started writing 1,500 words daily no matter what. Within a week, I'd written past the problem entirely—and realized the plot hole only existed because I'd been thinking in isolated scenes instead of continuous story flow.

This is what I call The Forward Pressure Technique: using consistent daily word count to create narrative momentum that exposes and eliminates logical inconsistencies through cumulative context rather than surgical editing.

Why Plot Holes Thrive in Stop-and-Start Writing

When you write sporadically—500 words here, nothing for five days, 2,000 words in a caffeine-fueled weekend—you're constantly relearning your own story. You forget minor details. You lose track of what characters know and when they know it. Most dangerously, you start treating each writing session as a discrete creative event rather than part of a continuous dream.

Plot holes don't usually come from big structural failures. They come from micro-disconnections:

- A character references an event that hasn't happened yet in story chronology
- Someone knows information they shouldn't have access to
- An object appears in a scene despite being destroyed three chapters ago
- A character's skill level fluctuates wildly based on what the plot needs

These inconsistencies flourish in the gaps between writing sessions. Your conscious mind patches them over with assumptions, and you genuinely don't notice you've created a logic problem until a beta reader points it out.

How the Forward Pressure Technique Works

The Forward Pressure Technique isn't about writing faster or producing more words. It's about maintaining continuous narrative consciousness. Here's the framework:

Step 1: Commit to Your Daily Minimum

Choose a word count between 500-1,500 words. This isn't about matching King's output—it's about creating a rhythm where you touch your story every single day. The specific number matters less than the consistency.

Step 2: Write Chronologically (No Scene Jumping)

This is crucial. You must write your story in sequence, scene after scene, even through the parts you're unsure about. Jumping ahead to "the good parts" breaks the pressure that forces logical consistency.

Step 3: Never Go Back to "Fix" Until You Hit 20,000 Words

This is the hard part. When you notice a plot hole forming—and you will—make a note in brackets [FIX: Sarah shouldn't know about the warehouse yet] and keep writing forward. Do not stop to repair it. The forward pressure needs to build.

Step 4: Trust the Accumulation

As you continue writing with daily consistency, you maintain an active mental model of your entire story. Your working memory stays engaged with all the narrative threads. Often, what seemed like a plot hole resolves itself because continued writing provides the missing context or reveals a better story logic.

The Technique in Action

Let me show you how this worked in my own manuscript. Around page 87, my protagonist Marcus needed to know the address of an abandoned factory to advance the plot. I'd established earlier that he was estranged from his police officer sister and had no law enforcement contacts.

Old approach: I would have stopped, gone back, and inserted a scene 30 pages earlier where Marcus befriends someone who could plausibly provide this information. This creates new problems—now I need to explain why he doesn't call this helpful person in other tight situations.

Forward Pressure approach: I made a note [FIX: How does Marcus get this address?] and wrote the scene anyway, with him somehow obtaining the information. I kept my daily 1,200 words flowing.

Three days later, while writing a seemingly unrelated scene where Marcus visits his ailing father, the solution emerged organically. His father, experiencing dementia, confused Marcus with someone else and rambled about "that place they're tearing down on Riverside." It gave Marcus the general location, which he could then find through public records—something fully within his capabilities.

The solution was better than anything I would have engineered because it served multiple purposes: advancing plot, deepening character relationships, and adding thematic resonance about memory and disconnection. But I only discovered it by maintaining forward pressure and letting my subconscious work on the problem while my conscious mind kept producing daily pages.

Why This Works Better Than Editing-as-You-Go

When you maintain daily forward momentum, you're essentially keeping your entire story loaded in RAM instead of saving it to disk and rebooting every few days. Your brain naturally tracks causality, chronology, and character knowledge when that information stays active.

Think of it like maintaining a conversation. If someone tells you something on Monday, you remember it when they reference it on Tuesday. But if you only talk to them once a month, you forget details and contradict yourself.

Writing with daily consistency creates that same continuity. You remember what happened in Chapter 3 because you're still mentally living in that story world, not because you went back and reread it.

Getting Started Tomorrow

Pick your minimum word count tonight. Make it modest—better to hit 500 words daily than to aim for 2,000 and write nothing for three days after burning out.

Tomorrow, write that amount no matter what. Continue chronologically from wherever you are. When you spot logical problems, bracket them and move forward.

After 20,000 words of continuous forward pressure, go back and read what you've created. You'll be shocked at how many "plot holes" aren't actually holes—they're just contexts you hadn't fully developed yet.

The ones that remain? Those are your real structural problems, not the phantom issues that evaporate under forward pressure. And you'll have 20,000 words of momentum to help you fix them properly.