This one’s for the writers:
It’s easy for all of us to get overwhelmed by the kinds of tasks that aren’t cut and dry, the ones that take longer than a couple of minutes, an hour, or a day to complete.
“The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus,” writes Johann Hari, author of Stolen Focus.1
For the writers among us, we say we’re going to write a book. We make intentions to write a book. We research our topic; we outline; we let ideas take shape, sometimes for years before we actually start the process of writing a chapter.
When it’s time, if it’s time, we sit down before a computer, or perhaps, if we’re blessedly old-fashioned, with a pen and paper. We begin to write, because, this is the book! I’ve got this! Surely, The Writing Muse will be with me every step of the way, because this is what she does and who she is and she has decided to take up residency in my very body!
This works for a little while until New Year’s resolutions lose their shine or life gets in the way or we become distracted and run out of steam.
Suddenly, you stop chasing after that middle grade novel, that memoir, that nonfiction book around the 13,000 word mark. You stop writing because who has time when you also have a day job and the humans who live under your roof claim they need to eat a couple of times a day?
First, let the record show: this is me. This is maybe you as well, but every example in the aforementioned paragraph entirely stems from my life and from the four unpublished books that live on the back burner of my (Scrivener) computer.
Freelance writing is not my bread and butter; I have a part-time job that requires me to clock in and get things done that aren’t actually under the umbrella of writing a book. Even though writing is my first love, this kind of writing is often secondary when it comes to my daily priorities.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t still prioritize my writing. It just means I have to instill different priorities around my writing.
I could soliloquize about the benefits of taking a day off technology each week (which I do) or installing a social media blocker if you need extra assistance (which I’ve done in the past). I could tell you about the magic of setting a timer2 or about the physical and mental benefits of writing writing with pen and paper. All of these things have helped me as a writer; all of these things have served different purposes at different points in time.
But the number one thing I’ve done when it comes to those longer pieces of writing, which is to say, the 60,000 word spiritual memoirs and other in-process manuscripts, is to aim for 500 words a day.
Now, look: 500 words is not a whole lot. In the land of college-ruled notebook paper, that’s front and back, single-spaced. That’s a double-spaced two-page paper. That’s less than most scenes in a novel and a couple of strong paragraphs in a nonfiction book.
But it’s something.
500 words a day is more than something.
And over time, all of those little somethings add up to a big kind of something. Those somethings add up to a chapter, which adds up to a section and then an entire manuscript. Those somethings will certainly need rewriting, but first drafts were made to be shitty.
After all, sometimes the point is just to get the words out, which is to say, to get those 500 words onto paper one day and then add another 500 onto it the next day.
The overeager, quick-to-consume part of me still wishes for writing that’s more like a hot wok instead of a slow cooker, but the part of me that believes in the goodness of leaning into slow and steady work relishes in the gradual build of the work.
And I remember I’m not alone: Hemingway also only wrote 500 words a day,3 and in Travels With Charley, Steinbeck said that he gradually wrote one page, and then another.4 When she's not traveling, author Kate DiCamillo writes two pages everyday.5
So, join me? It may not feel like much, but a little bit of not much adds up over time.
In this with you,
c.
You can find Stolen Focus wherever books are sold (but here’s a link to it on Amazon if you want to kick a few pennies over to me). The quote was taken from this article, which ran in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/02/attention-span-focus-screens-apps-smartphones-social-media
https://blog.scribd.com/the-magic-of-setting-a-timer-for-reading/
https://writingcooperative.com/10-legendary-writers-their-daily-word-counts-692c56cb97a5
This was my book of the week last week, did you see?
https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/minipage&CISOPTR=15878&CISOMODE=print
This was outrageously helpful! Also, I need to honor the 500 words, I've always tried to hit 600 or even 700 and then felt like I could never quite reach it. Realizing 500 is perhaps where the zone of genius lives.
Thank you! Hungrily taking such do-able advice!