Those two words are some of the most powerful a writer can use… The End. Sounds pretty intense, hm?
And well they should. This is the final day of the first Round of Words in 80 Days of 2017, and I don’t know about you all, but I feel like I need at least one or two more of these little darlings before things are working the way I’d like them too. That means goals and plans for Round 2 in 10 days, but no more check-ins until April 2nd. I will post a linky this coming Sunday for people to post their goals at, but there will be no post next Wednesday (unless someone wants to volunteer and write something inspirational 😉 )
Speaking of inspirational… do you know all the great people involved in the ROW80 these days? From our founder, Kait Nolan, to our Facebook admins, Shan Jeniah and Denise Young, to our great members… and even myself, the ROW80 is seething with friendly, inspiring creative types. If you have been peeking into our blogs but haven’t joined, why not do so in our upcoming Round 2?
For now, let’s just do our end-round check-in and assessment of our progress. Just add it to our linky:
Annnd… another week down. The End of Round 1 is getting closer and closer, and that means it’s time to start thinking about new goals and about calmly assessing how we’re doing so far. It’s also time to check-in with our fellow ROWers for support, encouragement and for the fun of it. As usual, you have a few ways to share your progress:
our linkies (or you can click on the cute froggie below)
So y’all, let’s have a little talk. I started ROW80 back in 2010 (!!!) because I wanted a writing challenge that was more flexible than National Novel Writing Month. I felt like it was important to give writers a place where they could get that kind of support but set goals that work for their lives. From that standpoint, ROW80 has been, I think, a huge success. We’ve developed a great little community here–and that’s the thing. We are a COMMUNITY. Communities are (or should be) inherently SOCIAL.
The original incarnation of ROW80 was blog-based because that’s how the other non NaNo challenges I’d participated in were set up–and also because I was a super active blogger back then. But the world has changed. Where those first years, we averaged 40-50k visitors over the course of a year, we now are going to be hitting less than 20k. There’s been an enormous drop in traffic to the site because blogs just aren’t how people tend to do things these days. I’ve maintained the site and the linkies (not free) all these years and coordinated sponsors every round, and over the last couple of years it’s just gotten harder to do as I’ve had more and more on my professional plate. I didn’t even manage to recruit enough sponsors for Round 3, so some of these kind, awesome people have been pinch hitting and doing double duty.
ROW80 is not going away. But it is going to change. I have made the decision to put the blog in stasis. Well, it’s not going anywhere, because there are a lot of awesome inspirational posts here, but it’s not going to be the focal point of the challenge. Instead, we’re moving things TO OUR FACEBOOK GROUP. It’s just flat EASIER to post your updates there and get comments. And it makes for more of a community-oriented focus than the way we’ve done things up to now. There will be those who complain “Oh, but I’m not on Facebook!” just as there were those who argued “Oh, but I don’t have a blog!” I’ll say the same thing now as I said then: My challenge, my rules. This is a FREE support group maintained by me and it is your choice whether to participate or not. It costs you nothing to create a Facebook account, just as it cost you nothing to create a blog for the original version of the challenge.
I want to open the doors for everybody to post inspiring things there. Memes, articles, whatever. Not only because it relieves the burden of me needing to recruit sponsors, but also because it’s YOUR community and I think you have lots of valuable things to share.
Welcome back on this glorious holiday weekend, y’all!
The Geek Out
If you were around for the tail end of Round 2, you got to see me geek out over one of my new favorite tools, Pacemaker. Pacemaker lets you set your goal (words, pages, etc.) and your timeline–and THEN it allows you to adjust things based on life stuff. Got a business trip out of town scheduled? You can set those days to either skip or have a lower goal. Want to work more on weekends? You can set that, too. And the system updates everything to show you what you need to do in order to reach your goal by the deadline you set. Even better? You can turn your project into a widget or into an iCal in order to make sure your writing time is FRONT AND CENTER on your calendar! It is the absolute perfect tool to enable you to manage your writing goals! And it’s free!
Turns out the makers of Pacemaker thought so too!
The Partnership
So ROW80 has OFFICIALLY partnered up with Pacemaker for Round 3! They have designed for us a special page for our challenge. You can create up to 5 projects (since often people work on more than one thing during the course of a round). Or, if you’re less focused on a specific book, there’s absolutely an option to track your writing as a habit. On our challenge page, you’ll be able to see everybody who’s participating and how they’re doing on their goal. You can copy their plan and customize to make it your own or start from scratch. Here’s my first project for the round, which I’m already 2/3rds finished with. You can see how my productivity jumps around, and how I’ve scheduled time off for my vacation this week. There are so many options to customize. While writing is the most obvious, you can also track editing, reading, study or work as a goal. You can measure words, pages, chapters, characters, verses, acts, scenes, stanzas, lines, items, minutes, hours, or tasks. And there’s a whole long list of types of projects already built in.
My Challenge To You
Pacemaker is an incredibly powerful tool that can enable you to take control of your writing life. I can’t count the number of times participants goggle at what I manage to get done with everything I juggle. And the fact of the matter is, it’s as Thomas Jefferson once said, “It’s amazing how much can be done if we are always doing.” This is pretty much the theme of my life. I’m always, always doing something, whether it’s plotting the next book, working on a character sketch, or just spewing out a hundred words in a spare ten minutes. I don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, I don’t wait for the perfect time. And I don’t beat myself up if I don’t reach some lofty, perfect goal (most of the time…). Because the absolute truth of the matter is that any progress is better than no progress. If your goal is 1,000 words a day and you only manage 250, that’s 250 that you didn’t have before and your brain stayed at least a little bit in the story. THAT is what I want to reward this round–ANY consistent progress toward your goal, no matter how small. Whether you’re chipping away at that final word count by inches or feet, I want you to make an effort to do something each and every day. Stop letting everything else in your life come first. No excuses. If you want to be a writer, then writing has to be a priority. Just remember that making it a priority only means making SOME kind of progress, not ALL the progress (although if you can make All the progress, that’s awesome!).
Don’t forget to write up your goals on your blog and link back to the post on the linky below so we can all swing by and cheer you on. And if you’re jumping in after this linky is closed, just scroll to the currently active check-in linky and do the same thing.
Powered by Linky Tools
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list…
Usually I’d be ending on some kind of rah-rah high note but I find myself fresh out of specific inspiration this morning. What I do have to share is glee over a new tool. It is no secret that I love stats. I have a possibly unhealthy relationship with my spreadsheets, and I get twitterpated over graphs that show my progress. So when fellow author Jessica Fox pointed me toward Pacemaker, I might’ve had a full on flail of excitement. Actually, the flail was mutual because we both love trackers.
What is Pacemaker? Well, I’ll swipe the about copy from their website:
A Simple Flexible Planner for Writers & Students
Set a Goal
Give a memorable name to your project and determine how much you want to do within your timeframe.
Set a Strategy
Want to start small? How about swallowing the frog and knocking out large workloads right away? Tell Pacemaker when you can commit more or less time to your work and how you want to approach the workload.
Sit Back
Pacemaker calculates a schedule that will help you finish on-time! No need to wrestle with spreadsheets or do manual calculations. Download your plan in iCal format or save your plan to your Pacemaker Account.
Pace Yourself
Start working towards your target. Each day counts! As long as you follow the Pacemaker schedule, you will finish ontime.
Record Progress
Record your progress and Pacemaker will adjust your workload based on how you’ve been doing. Further adjust your plan based on any new changes to your availability.
Celebrate!
You did it! Take some time to celebrate this milestone.
Pacemaker is a playful way of making peace with your writing goals. You set a word count goal, chip away at it day by day and finish on-time! You can approach your writing target in various ways to suit your style :
Steady – write the same amount of work every day.
Rising to the Challenge – start off small and increase your word count quota every day.
Biting the Bullet – bite off large chunks of your writing goal at the beginning of your schedule so that the pressure is off at the end of your schedule.
Random – each day is a surprise, you may need to complete 5 words or 500! Whether heavy or light, you’ll reach your word count goal at the end of your specified schedule.
One of the big things that Jessica and I both love about it is the setting that allows you to adjust the schedule. So, for example, I have taekwondo on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means my evening writing time is more or less nil. So I can’t expect as much of myself on those days. This allows me to account for that. If you routinely take a particular day of the week off to mentally rest, you can account for that. There are a ton of ways to adjust the thing, and since ROW80 is all about setting your own goals, this is a tool that fits right into our mission statement and gives you a way to sort out what you need to do to meet those goals when life happens.
I’m a big fan of TED talks. In a world where I sometimes watch a shameful amount of cute puppy and cat videos (don’t judge), it sparks my brain to actually think about stuff. I came across this one last week as I was trying to decide what to post about today and the lightbulb went off. Now, specifically, Ms. Saujani is talking about girls and the tech industry (coding in particular), but I think the message applies in a much broader context. It’s well worth watching the full thing. It’s less than 13 minutes. Go ahead. I’ll be here when you get back.
This was very eye opening for me in some ways. Not the idea that girls are hideously outnumbers in the tech industry, but thinking about this idea that girls are raised to be perfect and boys are raised to be brave. In many ways, I am not very girly. I’m brash, outspoken, bold, and I believe I can do anything (we aren’t going to talk about that failed stint in ballet in the fourth grade). I am, by many accounts, fearless. And looking back, I think it’s no mistake that I grew up where the only kids to play with were boys, where my dad had wanted a son and so taught me to do all kinds of traditionally boy things (I could out-shoot most of my male peers in high school. This did nothing to improve my date-ability, but that’s a whole other story). On the rare occasions my mom managed to arrange playdates with other girls, I was BORED OUT OF MY MIND by all the games of “house” and “school” and [insert game to socialize traditional female gender roles]. I wanted to be out with the guys, building bike ramps, playing pirates, doing all the rough and tumble, generally risky things that little boys do. I didn’t always come out unscathed, but I kept up. I didn’t acquire any close girlfriends until 6th grade and on, so during those seriously formative years Saujani talks about…I learned bravery, not perfection.
What does any of this have to do with writing?
Something talked about among writers of both genders all the time is a serious inability to declare something done and just let it go. There’s always that desire to keep tweaking and messing with stuff, trying to dial in that final product to the nth degree closer to our vision. I call this George Lucas Syndrome. He began with Episode IV because the technology in the 70s didn’t allow him to bring to life the rich and varied worlds he envisioned for Episodes I-III. Then, once technology caught up, he began to go back and “fix” parts of the original trilogy. Some of it was innocent enough. Erasing the Vasoline smudge beneath Luke’s land speeder that covered the wheels. Showing Han moving up in the frame as he steps on Jabba, while moving around him in Mos Eisley. But he couldn’t stop there. He had to go and replace poor David Prowse in the end with Hayden Christensen (nevermind the fact that Obiwan and Yoda’s ghosts were exactly as they were when THEY died, aka OLD.). I mean, dude, this is AFTER Prowse learned all the lines and delivered them, only to have them bring in James Earl Jones to do the voiceover work. That’s just RUDE. But I digress. Lucas just kept tweaking and kept tweaking the original trilogy (while also delivering Episodes I-III, in which he clearly went for flash and special effects rather than effectively executed plots–no, I’m not bitter. Why do you ask?) until the end results cast a serious pall on the films the fans adored.
Why would Lucas do this? Apart from the fact that he COULD (a danger also faced by those who self-publish, who absolutely have the capability of going in and doing everything from fixing errant typos to overhauling an entire book), I think it came down to this obsession with perfection. In his mind, the movies were flawed and he was rectifying that. He didn’t trust the fans to just support the franchise on its own merits, flaws and all. He wasn’t brave.
I’ve realized that I’m something of an anomaly among writers. I don’t have this obsession with perfection. Now that’s not to say my work is sloppy. It’s not. I have incredibly high standards and I won’t release a book until I believe I’ve made it as good as I can make it. But once it’s out in the wild, other than fixing wonky formatting or catching mistakes that made it through proofreading, I don’t mess with things. I don’t even feel compelled to. Once a book is out of my hands, I’ve already moved on to the next story. And since my production schedule could easily take me into 2030 writing full time, it is to my benefit not to dwell on books already past. It’s not that I’m not afraid of what people think of my work. There’s always that fear that it sucks and people are going to hate it because writing is an intensely personal thing and each book baby sent out into the world for judgment feels like our head on the chopping block. But I figure, I gave it my all at the time I was writing, and that’s all I can do.
So many writers struggle with this. They write and rewrite and reread and rehash and revamp and revise and regurgitate THE SAME BOOK. Yes, revision is an important and necessary part of writing. But there’s a difference between turning your basil into pesto and turning it into the stuff hanging out in a cow’s third stomach. If you keep messing with stuff you run the risk of ruining it (I’m looking at you George Lucas) and of not truly learning anything. You have to be willing to put it out there, let it go, and get some feedback (no matter how harsh that feedback may be). You have to be brave enough to fail so that you can LEARN. Failure teaches so many more lessons than success. Hanging on to something until you think you can get it perfect runs too much risk of it never getting out there at all.
So that’s my challenge to you this round. Be brave with your work instead of perfect. The world will thank you for it. ~Kait Nolan
STATE YOUR GOALS!
If you’re new to this process, write up your goals on your blog and link directly to the post in the linky below. If it’s past the start of round, then just find the most recent check-in and link there.
Click here to enter your link and view this Linky Tools list of #ROW80 participants.
The UK has won 3 of the last 4 Tour De France races. Prior to that? They’d never won a single one in the history of the race (which started in 1903). The secret to their success? Well, according to Matthew Syed’s interview with Sir David Brailsford, “It is about marginal gains,’ he said. ‘The approach comes from the idea that if you break down a big goal into small parts, and then improve on each of them, you will deliver huge increase when you put them all together.”
What does that mean exactly? Well, Syed goes on to say (in his book Black Box Thinking):
“The marginal gains mentality has pervaded the entire Team Sky mindset. They make sure that the cyclists sleep on the same mattress each night to deliver a marginal gain in sleep quality; that the rooms are vacuumed before they arrive at each new hotel, to deliver a marginal gain in reduced infections; that the clothes are washed with skin-friendly detergent, a marginal gain in comfort.”
I first read about this in on of Brian Johnson‘s Philosopher’s Notes (a fabulous little, distill-it-down email about some of the greatest books of our time) and the idea stuck with me. I’m all about breaking things down into manageable bits so that a project doesn’t seem so overwhelming, but this is something else entirely. This is about all the little things that you probably DON’T consider have an impact on your goal. In our case, writing.
Like, making sure that we have a comfortable chair with adequate back support. This means I don’t waste time fidgeting because I’m uncomfortable.
Swapping those God-awful compact fluorescent bulbs to something with a more pleasing hue. Not being annoyed by my lighting, means I can focus better on the task at hand more quickly.
Being sure to have a big, insulated glass of ice water right there and ready before I get started. It’s insulated, so it stays colder longer. It’s huge, so I don’t have to get up to refill it as often.
Putting on my headphones with MyNoise.net instead of just letting it play through the laptop speakers. This helps me block out distractions more effectively (even though I don’t have full-on noise-cancelling headphones).
Picking a candle scent to go along with a particular WIP. I picked this one up from Tawna Fenske. Lighting it and having that scent cue primes my brain for that particular book.
Getting up a few minutes earlier every day. I had though I’d need to get up a full hour before my normal wakeup time. And during NaNo, I did (because I was establishing a new habit). But I’ve learned that if I get up just half an hour earlier, I can usually crank out between 500-almost 1k words before my morning workout. Doing that every weekday means my total word count for the week is 2,500-5,000 words greater than not getting up. (Of course, now that Daylight Savings Time is upon us, I’m in the process of slowly rolling my body clock back and cursing profusely the whole time). Even fifteen minutes of writing is worth getting up because it starts my day in the story and means that I can stay in it a lot better, regardless of what else I happen to face the rest of the day, which makes my evening writing session far more productive.
Using Write or Die 2 instead of just drafting on a normal blank screen. I didn’t realize how much difference this would make. Man, that red screen of threat is hella motivating!
There are oodles of things that can feed in to our ability to get focused and stay focused, and I encourage you to give some thought to what little things you can do to achieve marginal gains in your writing. Those marginal gains add up over time, making the effort (which really isn’t that much) well worth it.
FYI: Round 1 officially begins Monday, January 4th, but I had time to do this today and I know a lot of folks will be thinking about goals with their New Year’s Resolutions and stuff, so I opted to go ahead and put this out there.
After 5 years of running this challenge, I’ve done a lot of cheerleading because I think creating a positive and encouraging space for writers is important. I’ve talked about the importance of creating sustainable change, being kind to yourself, and owning your moniker of writer. You can troll back through the archives for the fluffy cheerleader posts. That’s not what I’m here to do today. Today I’m getting tough and talking about the importance of honing your craft.
We all know that continuing to write regularly is important. Getting BICHOK (Butt In Chair, Hands on Keyboard) is an essential component of improving as a writer because WRITERS WRITE. And yeah, just straight up practice should help us improve. But mindless repetition without an intentional effort to learn and change isn’t going to give you the best results. That’s like dog paddling in the dark instead of striking out with a clear and steady stroke toward a light house. You might get there. You might also drown from wasting your energy.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume that most of you are in the same boat as I am–writing on top of some kind of day job (be that of the traditional paid variety or full-time parenting or whatever). Limited writing time means you have to make that time COUNT. And that means no dog paddling. Now I don’t mean that writing has to be this militant, all work all the time with no fun to what you’re doing. But happy, fluffy, fun writing isn’t going to make you the kind of writer who will someday be able to pay the bills. You have to TRAIN. You have to STUDY. You have to WORK. You know, like you do with every other meaningful job on the planet.
Now there are a lot of aspects of craft you could choose to work on. Realistic dialogue. Character arc. Straight up refinement of prose. But the single most USEFUL aspect of craft that I have ever learned is STORY STRUCTURE. All marketable stories adhere more or less to the same one. Doesn’t matter what the plot-level trappings are. All good stories boil down to the same recognizable structure. It’s part of how we are wired as humans.
Now writers tend to fall into one of two camps (ish–of course there’s a spectrum, but go with it).
You have your hard-core plotters (like me), who approach building a story from the ground up, like an engineer or architect.
Or you have the pantsers who prefer to reveal the story as they go, like one of those chainsaw carvers who find a bear or moose in a log.
It doesn’t matter if you gravitate toward plotting or pantsing or somewhere in between–knowing structure will improve your work. You’ll either have your skeleton from the beginning and know what to build on or you’ll know what you’re aiming to uncover in your exploratory draft. And structure is a thing that, once learned, you can’t UNSEE. In every movie you watch, every book you read, you’ll find yourself recognizing those beats. And in every one you watch or read that doesn’t work…you’ll be able to trace it back (often) to a violation of accepted rules of structure.
Now, of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but it’s that whole thing where you have to KNOW and understand the rule before you can effectively break it.
So that’s my challenge to you this round. If you aren’t familiar with story structure, LEARN IT. If structure isn’t your issue, pick some other aspect of your craft to work on. Read blogs. Read books. Watch tutorials. Go beyond your own work to LEARN STUFF. It’s time to LEVEL UP as a writer.
Here’s a list of my favorite resources for story structure:
Story Engineeringby Larry Brooks (worth getting in paperback so you can sticky tab and underline)
The Hero’s 2 Journeys (only available in audiobook but cheap at $5.95 and SO WORTH IT)
Channel 101 (6-parter–go through all of them–be prepared for some irreverent language, if that’s a thing for you)
With that in mind…
State Your Goals
Click here to enter the link to your goals (be sure to link to the specific page and not your main blog) and view this Linky Tools list of other ROWers participating.
I’ve had about a million ideas for this year end wrap up post for ROW80. I have, over the last–holy crap–FIVE YEARS, written about everything from data driven decision making, to habits, to owning your dream as a writer, to being kind to yourself, to…all kinds of other stuff. Because I’m a very outcome-oriented person, I think a lot about goals and how to achieve them–and how to inspire and encourage others to achieve theirs. I believe in getting things done, and I’m very often of that mindset “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
I started A Round of Words in 80 Days as a reaction to National Novel Writing Month. NaNo is awesome in that it gets people excited and amped up–but I saw far too many people beating themselves up for failing to meet that goal. Writers are already prone to self-flagellation on multiple levels. We don’t need another reason to be hating on ourselves because the life we lead doesn’t neatly allow for us to attain that one-size fits all goal. I also hated that it was November (horrible time for people in academia and really for anyone hosting Thanksgiving). I’m a writer 365 days a year. I needed a support group for the other 11 months, too. And that’s what ROW80 has become–for me and so many others who’ve become a regular part of this community. Over the years, we’ve grown together, cheered each other on, and supported each other, no matter what. That gift is one beyond measure.
Any of you who’ve followed me during that time know that I have an unhealthy obsession with spreadsheets and data. Call it an occupational hazard. I’m a social scientist in real life, so I have this driving need to quantify things and track them. I’ve been tracking my daily word count since 2010, using that information to see where and how I can push myself to write more (I talk exhaustively about this in my post about data-driven decision making). The goal in the back of my mind has always been to get to NaNo levels of productivity all the time.
That 50,000 words in one month has been my Holy Grail, partly just to prove that I can do it and partly because that level of productivity each month would finally allow me to produce enough content to really build an audience and make major strides toward being able to write full-time (also, it might allow me to carve some inroads in my To Be Written pile, though I’m pretty sure that is hopeless, as I keep getting attacked by rabid plot bunnies on a regular basis).
This NaNo, I actually did it. I blew through 55k in a month, in fact. And I’m on track to do the same for December. Which is…awesome. I can’t tell you all the numbers I’ve been running trying to sort out what I want to put on next year’s production schedule. Now I say all of this, not to be all yay me but because I’ve been having all these thoughts about how the heck I got here and how you can, too (if that’s what you want).
Stop saying you can’t do something
For years I said that word count of 50,000 words in a month was impossible. That I couldn’t wake up early and write. Along with a whole plethora of other can’ts I won’t get into here. If you’re struggling with something, don’t say you can’tdo it as an absolute. That’s negative, defeatist thinking and is programming you for failure. Instead, reframe it as I can’t do _____ YET. Because that leaves room for improvement and learning and change. Carol Dweck has a fantastic TED talk about this.
Embrace Write or Die
One of the biggest tools in my box for how I’ve finally pulled off this fast drafting gig is Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die 2. You can use the traditional punishment mode (wherein if you stop writing it starts deleting words) or you can work it in reward mode, where you get pictures of puppies or kittens or whatever for every x number of words. The key to this for me is that even in reward mode (my preference), if I stop writing for longer than about twenty seconds, the screen starts to turn red to remind me to get my metaphorical butt moving. At that pace, my internal editor simply DOES NOT have time to engage. I’ve come to realize that without that stimulus, I spend a lot of time just STARING AT THE PAGE. But I set my test mile of 500 words and 30 minutes for a session, and I almost always exceed that by at least 50% and usually more. And when I’m done, I copy and paste the text over into the relevant section of Scrivener.
Recognize that mastery takes time
So there was this study done by K. Anders Ericsson that basically says that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any skill-based field. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Outliers (well worth a read). For writers, this is generally assumed to equate to a million words. Now, it’s not just mechanical repetition. A million crap words with no deliberate attempt to analyze and improve is just going to be a million crap words. But a million words written with that intentionality toward learning, growing, getting better–THAT kind of practice does lead to mastery. I realized today that this year I surpassed my million words (see, more reason to track stuff). Since 2010, I’ve written over 1.3 million words. And right around the time I crossed that million mark, something shifted in my brain. Is writing easy? Nope. Do I write perfect first drafts? Other than one book–no, I don’t. I don’t ever expect to. But getting that first draft down and out of my head–THAT has gotten easier and I’ve gotten faster. I’ve spent the last six years studying and working my butt off to learn and do everything in my power to improve my craft, and I know it shows. Are there better writers out there? Heck yeah. Always will be. But I know that I’m better for all the work and practice. Great writers never, ever stop trying to learn and improve, no matter how many books or stories they write.
So, wherever you are in your million word journey, I hope you’ll come back to join us on January 4th for the beginning of Round 1 in 2016. Your cheerleaders will be waiting.
Prior to every new round of ROW80, I spend a great deal of time thinking about what I want to write about to launch things–what challenge I want to issue or wisdom I want to impart. Some rounds I do better than others. Sometimes life gets bananas and I’m lucky to have three sentences to string together along with the goals linky. And some rounds I have so many ideas, I hardly know where to begin. Today I’m caught up in the latter. Usually I have my post written and all the linkies laid in well before the start of the round so that things run like a well-oiled machine. But I’m sitting here the day before Round 4 launches, trying to keep my eyes open and my cracked out squirrel attention focused long enough to get this done. I’m coming off a serious hell week at the Evil Day Job and it’s thrown me off my game. It was the kind of week that spurred me to start this writing challenge in the first place. Life. Lots and lots of LIFE happening. Under those circumstances, it’s easy to get discouraged and think that you’ll never manage to carve out more time to write, that you’ll never be able to crank out more words.
Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you’re right.
The power of what you think you can do is tremendous. Those of you who’ve been around for a while will know that I regularly push you to add just a hundred words to whatever goal you set. Another half hour to your butt in chair, hands on keyboard time. Stretch those writing muscles. If you don’t challenge yourself you won’t get better.
I encourage all of you to track how much you’re writing. For those of you who are struggling to get words, you may think this serves as a reminder of how little you’re getting done. You need to change your perspective. By tracking what you’re producing, how much you’re getting written each day, you have a baseline. And that gives you a frame for getting better. How’s that? Through data driven decision making.
Say what?
Okay, so I have what might be deemed an unhealthy addiction to spreadsheets. I like tracking things. I especially like tracking things and seeing them go in the direction I want. I approach my writing no differently. I began tracking my daily word count back in 2010. That was the year I decided to take this writing thing as seriously as my Evil Day Job. I figured it would be good practice for eventually having writing BE my day job and also that I’d never get there without some serious discipline. That first year, I managed just over 100k and felt like I’d run a marathon. I averaged just over 600 words on writing days, and I wrote fewer days than I didn’t. In 2011, I set myself a goal to average at least 700 words a day on the days that I wrote. I did that (735 average, which is a 21.4% increase for you math geeks). My number of writing days stayed about the same. In 2012, I pushed for 800 words average (because increasing my output by about 100 words a day had proved to be doable) and also vowed to get my butt in chair to write more days. And so it went. In 2013 I decided I should start counting the words I wrote on plotting (which was a lot). Each and every year, I’ve tracked, and each and every year, I’ve written more and more, figuring out where I could stretch myself.
What’s that look like? Well, see for yourself. This is the annual tab from my spreadsheet as of today.
At this point, I’ve just about maxed out how many words I can write on average, and I write almost every day, so the area I’m striving to improve now is to reduce “waste” (I tend to lose about 35% of my words in revisions, so I’m trying to do a better job with first drafts–I won’t bore you with the spreadsheet tracking THAT). Anyway, my point is, I wouldn’t have any clue how much I’ve grown and improved in my ability to get stuff done as a writer if I hadn’t been tracking.
Now, I’m not saying you necessarily need to have anything as elaborate as I do (although I have my spreadsheet available for download on my blog if you’re into that), but track something this round. After you’ve got a week or two under your belt, take that number of words or number of days and strive to increase it by just 5%. That’s it. 5%. So, if you’re cranking out 500 words a day, you only have to add 25 words. That’s IT. That’s two sentences. You’ve got that. Keep tracking, and each time you feel yourself getting comfortable with whatever level you’ve reached, add another 5%. And when it comes time to set your goals for the first round of 2016, figure out how you can push yourself to be better, to write more. I’ll be right there with you.
Now, GET READY! GET SET! STATE YOUR GOALS! GO FORTH AND BE AWESOME!
Click here to enter the link to your goals post (which should be posted on your own blog–be sure and link directly to the post and not to the main blog). Then hop around and visit some of your fellow ROWers to leave encouragement.
Speaking of inspirational… do you know all the great people involved in the ROW80 these days? From our founder, Kait Nolan, to our Facebook admins, Shan Jeniah and Denise Young, to our great members… and even myself, the ROW80 is seething with friendly, inspiring creative types. If you have been peeking into our blogs but haven’t joined, why not do so in our upcoming Round 2?
A Round of Words in 80 Days: The Writing Challenge That Knows You Have A Life 