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The jump to 500.
Aug. 17th, 2011 12:27 pmForcing myself to write more on a regular basis has flexed and exercised creative muscles that I need to develop, if I want to be in good enough shape to be a novelist. But in every workout program, there are plateaus where progress is hard to see, and barriers it is hard to improve past.
For years I was in awful shape -- 100 words a day was too much. Oh, on high-energy days I could write ten or twenty or even fifty times that, but on a slow day, glaring at my screen and willing my fingers to move across the keys, that much creation was too onerous a chore. I was proud of myself for a 40-day streak of at least a hundred words a day.
Two years ago is the first time I made a real, organized try at it. 100 words a day, every day, all year. I failed -- I didn't even get the overall quota of 36,500 completed. But it established the habit of making an effort. Last year, I decided (correctly) that the problem was setting the bar too low -- 100 words isn't much of an achievement to build on. So I set out to write 250 words a day, every day, and got somewhere into March or April before that effort fell apart completely. The middle of the year was a relative dry spell, and though the end of the year picked up again considerably, I was still woefully short of my desired count -- a best-guess estimate made last year a 40,000 word year. Half of those words were one story, written in mid-December.
Still. That year was better than any year that came before it -- maybe by as much as a factor of two! My one finished novel is 90,000 words long, and it took me six years to write, after all...
And that December story, The Knight of the Star, really got me moving. I was writing 4 and 5,000 words a day, truly tackling writing as a full-time job (with overtime hours), which is my eventual goal. It burned me out and shut me down for a week or two afterward... but it showed me it was possible. I renewed my New Year's Resolution and headed into 2011 at a run. My momentum never slowed down until May -- long after I had jumped my goal from 250 words per day to 425 words per day -- 425 being what my actual daily average was at that point, and the amount that seemed natural. I had worried that forcing myself to produce too much, too quickly would decrease the quality of the work, but that proved not to be true in the least. If anything, regular exercise of those muscles made my other writing muscles step up their game, as well.
May and July each contained substantial slogs, dry spells that frustrated me, but I managed to make up for them. And last week, I achieved my original goal for the year, and decided it was time to step up my workouts yet again -- 500 words, not 425.
Only a few days into that, I can tell you that the jump from 425 to 500 is proving harder to me than the jump from 250 to 425 did. I'm making it (missed one day, have mostly made up for it), but that last 75 words takes longer, and afterwards, well, I feel the burn. And it is, at least a little, hurting the quality of the work -- not so substantially that a quick editing pass can't polish things up again, but enough that I notice it. Enough that scenes are dragging on longer than they should and slower than they should, so that I can wring enough words out of th reservoir to meet quota.
For the first half of this year, my exercise regimen was keeping me in shape, but it stayed well within the established limits and boundaries of my abilities. Now, at last, I'm pushing myself, stumbling uphill toward the next plateau. It hurts, and it isn't pretty. But I will get there.
In other news, my actual physical exercise regimen has yet to help me lose any weight, because I've been horrible about keeping to it. Oh well. One push at a time, I think....
For years I was in awful shape -- 100 words a day was too much. Oh, on high-energy days I could write ten or twenty or even fifty times that, but on a slow day, glaring at my screen and willing my fingers to move across the keys, that much creation was too onerous a chore. I was proud of myself for a 40-day streak of at least a hundred words a day.
Two years ago is the first time I made a real, organized try at it. 100 words a day, every day, all year. I failed -- I didn't even get the overall quota of 36,500 completed. But it established the habit of making an effort. Last year, I decided (correctly) that the problem was setting the bar too low -- 100 words isn't much of an achievement to build on. So I set out to write 250 words a day, every day, and got somewhere into March or April before that effort fell apart completely. The middle of the year was a relative dry spell, and though the end of the year picked up again considerably, I was still woefully short of my desired count -- a best-guess estimate made last year a 40,000 word year. Half of those words were one story, written in mid-December.
Still. That year was better than any year that came before it -- maybe by as much as a factor of two! My one finished novel is 90,000 words long, and it took me six years to write, after all...
And that December story, The Knight of the Star, really got me moving. I was writing 4 and 5,000 words a day, truly tackling writing as a full-time job (with overtime hours), which is my eventual goal. It burned me out and shut me down for a week or two afterward... but it showed me it was possible. I renewed my New Year's Resolution and headed into 2011 at a run. My momentum never slowed down until May -- long after I had jumped my goal from 250 words per day to 425 words per day -- 425 being what my actual daily average was at that point, and the amount that seemed natural. I had worried that forcing myself to produce too much, too quickly would decrease the quality of the work, but that proved not to be true in the least. If anything, regular exercise of those muscles made my other writing muscles step up their game, as well.
May and July each contained substantial slogs, dry spells that frustrated me, but I managed to make up for them. And last week, I achieved my original goal for the year, and decided it was time to step up my workouts yet again -- 500 words, not 425.
Only a few days into that, I can tell you that the jump from 425 to 500 is proving harder to me than the jump from 250 to 425 did. I'm making it (missed one day, have mostly made up for it), but that last 75 words takes longer, and afterwards, well, I feel the burn. And it is, at least a little, hurting the quality of the work -- not so substantially that a quick editing pass can't polish things up again, but enough that I notice it. Enough that scenes are dragging on longer than they should and slower than they should, so that I can wring enough words out of th reservoir to meet quota.
For the first half of this year, my exercise regimen was keeping me in shape, but it stayed well within the established limits and boundaries of my abilities. Now, at last, I'm pushing myself, stumbling uphill toward the next plateau. It hurts, and it isn't pretty. But I will get there.
In other news, my actual physical exercise regimen has yet to help me lose any weight, because I've been horrible about keeping to it. Oh well. One push at a time, I think....
