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40,000 words
They say that if you want to become good at something, you need to do it every day for a month.
They say that to be a writer, you need to write every day -- it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter if it's good, what matters is that you write every day. No excuses.
Last August, I set myself a challenge. There was so much going on, in my head and in my life and I was having vivid and restless dreams on a near nightly basis. I thought I wrote about it here, but in looking back to find the post, I see I did not. [ETA: Ah, I did, but much later than I thought! here] My challenge was to channel the dreams, the thoughts, the worries into something cathartic, something that would be just for me and not for anyone else: I was going to start writing again, writing without an end in mind, without any worry about whether others would be interested in it, without any guilt over appropriation (though, indirectly, I have maintained a list of stories and songs I have shamelessly stolen words from). I was going to write every day, and in order to make it a real challenge, I was going to write 500 words, no more, no less.
It turns out, 500 words is actually rather a lot. So the very first day I quickly changed it to 400. 400 is somehow a lot less.
I missed a few days, due to traveling or other reasons. A missed day meant 800 the next day. I made it to 20,000 words. And then, about two weeks after we moved, I tapered off. I was ill, exhausted, and had no working computer at home, meaning my usual time -- at night, before bed, when I had something to say, I had nothing to say it to. But I have kept count of the days, and when I needed to, returned and wrote more. In the last year, the story has grown and fractured and splintered, and I still have a relatively clear idea of where it is going I just don't quite know how to get it there yet. But I reached another milestone today, of 40,000 words. 100 days. What should've taken slightly over 3 months took slightly over a year, but 40,000 words is basically a novella!
Part of the design of the piece is that it is not told in a linear fashion (which means it may be rendered incomprehensible to follow to anyone other than me -- but that's okay, because as I said, I am writing this for ME, not for anyone else. Anyone else who wants to read along is welcome to, but know that you cannot expect yourself to understand it all.). I have found that my choice of writing this on Wordpress has proven to be wonderfully serendipitous, because Wordpress has an algorithm that calculates "related" posts, and at the bottom of each post, gives links to these related posts. The beautiful thing is that these are recalculated dynamically, which means that which posts are "related" changes as I write more, and the "related" posts can be ones written after the one you read. So the entire thing has become sort of a choose-your-own adventure, in that you could, say, start with Day 1) and then, instead of reading Day 2, and then Day 3, and read the items as I wrote them chronologically (which doesn't follow the story chronologically), go to Day 8, or Day 323 (Day 94), or Day 74, and then on from there. Because I tend to re-use certain language, and because Wordpress's algorithm is pretty good, you can use this method to trace a single thread through the story in a slightly more coherent way than reading the Days sequentially.
So, there it is. I will continue it until I reach the end that I see, and then I may sit down and try to revise it. Some of the early posts, before I really knew where I was going with all of this, would need to be changed. I would need to read it to make sure that the story in all its different threads can be followed by someone who is not inside my head. I think when that time comes, I might have something of interest here. But for now, I write for me, and it makes me happy -- or at least helps me sleep better at night.
They say that to be a writer, you need to write every day -- it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter if it's good, what matters is that you write every day. No excuses.
Last August, I set myself a challenge. There was so much going on, in my head and in my life and I was having vivid and restless dreams on a near nightly basis. I thought I wrote about it here, but in looking back to find the post, I see I did not. [ETA: Ah, I did, but much later than I thought! here] My challenge was to channel the dreams, the thoughts, the worries into something cathartic, something that would be just for me and not for anyone else: I was going to start writing again, writing without an end in mind, without any worry about whether others would be interested in it, without any guilt over appropriation (though, indirectly, I have maintained a list of stories and songs I have shamelessly stolen words from). I was going to write every day, and in order to make it a real challenge, I was going to write 500 words, no more, no less.
It turns out, 500 words is actually rather a lot. So the very first day I quickly changed it to 400. 400 is somehow a lot less.
I missed a few days, due to traveling or other reasons. A missed day meant 800 the next day. I made it to 20,000 words. And then, about two weeks after we moved, I tapered off. I was ill, exhausted, and had no working computer at home, meaning my usual time -- at night, before bed, when I had something to say, I had nothing to say it to. But I have kept count of the days, and when I needed to, returned and wrote more. In the last year, the story has grown and fractured and splintered, and I still have a relatively clear idea of where it is going I just don't quite know how to get it there yet. But I reached another milestone today, of 40,000 words. 100 days. What should've taken slightly over 3 months took slightly over a year, but 40,000 words is basically a novella!
Part of the design of the piece is that it is not told in a linear fashion (which means it may be rendered incomprehensible to follow to anyone other than me -- but that's okay, because as I said, I am writing this for ME, not for anyone else. Anyone else who wants to read along is welcome to, but know that you cannot expect yourself to understand it all.). I have found that my choice of writing this on Wordpress has proven to be wonderfully serendipitous, because Wordpress has an algorithm that calculates "related" posts, and at the bottom of each post, gives links to these related posts. The beautiful thing is that these are recalculated dynamically, which means that which posts are "related" changes as I write more, and the "related" posts can be ones written after the one you read. So the entire thing has become sort of a choose-your-own adventure, in that you could, say, start with Day 1) and then, instead of reading Day 2, and then Day 3, and read the items as I wrote them chronologically (which doesn't follow the story chronologically), go to Day 8, or Day 323 (Day 94), or Day 74, and then on from there. Because I tend to re-use certain language, and because Wordpress's algorithm is pretty good, you can use this method to trace a single thread through the story in a slightly more coherent way than reading the Days sequentially.
So, there it is. I will continue it until I reach the end that I see, and then I may sit down and try to revise it. Some of the early posts, before I really knew where I was going with all of this, would need to be changed. I would need to read it to make sure that the story in all its different threads can be followed by someone who is not inside my head. I think when that time comes, I might have something of interest here. But for now, I write for me, and it makes me happy -- or at least helps me sleep better at night.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-14 06:33 pm (UTC)(link)Valery
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