I've had people ask recently how I've gotten so consistent with my writing. This has not always been the case.
The first few writing years were filled with... I love writing. I want to write. I love having written. I hate writing. I can't write. I'm PARALYZED. I'm taking a break from writing... for oh, a year or so.
But now, I write. In January I was 25,000 words into my current WIP. Today, I'm almost to 80,000 words.
In the past four years, I've done two seriously vomitacious pregnancies, given birth to my second and third babies, kept two newborns alive through the grueling first six months, and completed the first draft of Novel #1, co-written Novel #2 with my husband, re-written and revised Novel #1 extensively, nearly completed draft 1 of Novel #3, queried, entered contests, attended writing conventions, gotten an agent, revised for her, and said farewell to Novel #1 as it went out on submission. And I've done it while running my photography business and serving in church callings and canning fruit and managing to sleep, eat, and exercise.
Because why? What has made this craziness possible?
Fifteen minutes a day.
If I'm consistent, and I write fifteen minutes a day, I can produce a chapter every one to two weeks.
Now, granted, at this point, I write more like 1-2 hours a day. And I brainstorm and think and talk writing with all of my friends.
But on days when I'm paralyzed and I think I'm awful and I question this whole exercise in frustration, I sit my butt in my chair, and I pound on the keyboard for fifteen minutes.
Don't tell me you can't do it. Because you can. Fifteen minutes every single day will either become more, become rewarding, and start to create magic, or it won't.
But either way, lots of really smart people have been telling me since I got the itch as a teenager that real writers write.
So do.
Or don't.
We can be friends either way, but wouldn't you rather be writing friends?
Love this! It's so true -- the only way we can get the books written, get the stories told, is to actually write them. Isn't it amazing how a little time each day can add up to something wonderful?
ReplyDeleteYes! Regularity is SO helpful, isn't it? Well, we've talked about it before, how hard it is to get back into a project once we're out of it. (Speaking of that, I have done writing-related stuff these past two days, but I haven't written or revised. Tomorrow is going to be TOUGH.) And, yes, I like to be writing friends with you!
ReplyDeleteIn a side note, I kind of like the word vomitacious. Maybe not the implications of it, but the word itself has kind of a cool sound.