I have recently come to realise something. If you decide you will write every day, no matter what, and you give yourself no excuses and no quarter, even a champion procrastinator like me can get at least three lines out per day.
Now, you might say three lines are nothing. But you’d be wrong. At least according to some famous author I read years ago who did the math and figured out that if you wrote three lines a day for a year, you’d have a 50,000 word novel at the end. Or a 60,000 novel. Doesn’t matter. What matters is, as my friend Bone says, there will have been PROGRESS.
This is actually a big deal for me, progress. Because I’ve been stopping and starting with long breaks between my writing for a couple of years now. Until I made this demand of myself last month, I had not written a word since late last year. Now I have two new scenes and I’m still going.
Yep, it was all just lack of will to follow through. I guess some authors are right. Maybe there is no such thing as writer’s block. Just writers who want to be blocked.
Either way, celebrate with me. I got a new scene finished and I edited my sequel a bit.
What have you accomplished lately that you’re really happy over?
Yay for you! I totally agree. You have to commit to writing something, anything… no matter how little or crap it is. Once you start, progress happens. I felt completely lost starting my next chapter and so have spent a few days brainstorming the next few chapters, working out settings and the motivations of secondary characters and other background detail. Now I’m starting to get glimpses of how to tell the next bit of the story. I wish the process were faster, but hey, it is what it is.
I know! It’s also such slow going. The fact that I only have two scenes, one unfinished, after a month of writing every day is annoying. But that’s two more than in the last few months. And of course, I have now trained myself to write on command. I sit down and if I have 15 minutes, I can get a hundred to five hundred words. And that’s pretty good, I think. I think my best work comes when I slow down and let it germinate, like you said. But sometimes that process lets me procrastinate, so these days I’m pushing on and just deciding to edit when I get back in the document the next day, or skip editing until I’m finished with the manuscript.