I know that everyone has heard that “real writers” write every day. The most cited number is 1000 words a day, but it varies. You’ve probably also heard that writing 1000 words a day isn’t a necessity, and you shouldn’t force yourself to do it if that’s not how you write best.
Personally, I’ve always been a part of the latter group, but I decided to try something a little different this summer and it’s kind of changed my life. Today marks one month of writing 1000 words a day. in case you’re wondering, that’s over 30,000 words.
Now you might say that it’s easy because I’m a college student and it’s summer. It’s true that for the first week or so of this experiment, I had no responsibilities. I was at home for the week. I woke up late, went to Starbucks or the library, and wrote for a few hours. It was beautiful. But unfortunately, the rest of the month wasn’t like that. I work 9-12 Monday through Friday, and go to my internship from 1-5. It’s basically a full-time job.
Somehow, I found time to write. I tried to figure out the best way to make it work, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way. For a while, I tried to write at home. My roommate is too distracting, so I never got anything done. I wrote a lot at 11:30 on those nights, which made getting up the next morning very difficult. Then I started going to my favorite coffee shop as soon as I left my internship. That was great, but their coffee is too expensive, and I felt bad not buying anything. Plus, I have a hard time writing without caffeine.
In the end, I found that a mixture of these works best. The point is that I went out of my way to write. I ignored the fact that I was tired, or that I had nothing to write about, and I just wrote. I’ve been more productive than ever before, and that’s because I’m not afraid of writing crap. It happens sometimes. But it’s also very likely that somewhere in that 30,000 words, there’s a lot of good stuff.
So the next time you think about writing, do it. If you keep waiting for inspiration, you could be waiting a long time.
Apparently when Terry Pratchett was still an unknown with a day-job his word goal was 400 words per day. I just try to write something every day, even if it’s just a sentence to keep my hand in. Happy writing!