I recently spotted the post on Inkygirl about the 1,000 words a day movement. I guess I'm feeling optimistic after my little break from the day job, because I signed up for it.
The idea is to get 1,000 words a day completed, six days a week. If you don't make your word count one day, you just don't — there aren't any makeups.
I already have a spreadsheet where I track my word counts, and I pay myself a dollar every time I make quota for the day. I'm not very good about it — the muse is more important than the accountant — but it helps. I got the idea from Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life, and it's helped make the writing normal again. (Once upon a time this was axiomatic, but some very heavy negativity has made a bit of artifice necessary.)
The only quibble I have with challenges like these is that they often don't take revisions into account. If I'm going to spend a couple of hours with a printout and a pen using all the markup symbols I learned in university, I think that should count towards work too. Often it's implied, but not talked about directly as an act of creation.
I follow See's idea that two hours of revision is equal to a thousand words. The truth is, I can knock off more than a thousand words in two hours if I know what I want to say and I'm on a comfy keyboard, but since it's revision, I think that's fair.
Today I'm only going to get to about 700 words. It's a start.
The idea is to get 1,000 words a day completed, six days a week. If you don't make your word count one day, you just don't — there aren't any makeups.
I already have a spreadsheet where I track my word counts, and I pay myself a dollar every time I make quota for the day. I'm not very good about it — the muse is more important than the accountant — but it helps. I got the idea from Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life, and it's helped make the writing normal again. (Once upon a time this was axiomatic, but some very heavy negativity has made a bit of artifice necessary.)
The only quibble I have with challenges like these is that they often don't take revisions into account. If I'm going to spend a couple of hours with a printout and a pen using all the markup symbols I learned in university, I think that should count towards work too. Often it's implied, but not talked about directly as an act of creation.
I follow See's idea that two hours of revision is equal to a thousand words. The truth is, I can knock off more than a thousand words in two hours if I know what I want to say and I'm on a comfy keyboard, but since it's revision, I think that's fair.
Today I'm only going to get to about 700 words. It's a start.