I just read an interesting article on Medium entitled, “Lessons from Writing One Million Words,” written by Mason Sabre. I have a love/hate relationship with Medium. There are articles that I have enjoyed reading and learned something – win/win, right? If you post an article or use Medium for your blog, and people read your stuff, you can earn money. But Medium is a haven for listicles, and I feel that listicles fall under the click bait umbrella.
Anyway, I was intrigued by the title of this article. It reminded me of when I was in massage school (I had burned out on working in public education in northern New Jersey and declared, “Let’s move to Oregon! I’ll become a massage therapist!” We moved to Oregon. I’ve been working in higher education for twelve years. Never became an LMT), and one of my instructors said that after we completed 500 massages, we should send each client an apology because starting with Massage #501, we would have gained enough experience to know what we were doing.
Sabre sets a yearly goal of writing one million words. “One million words!” I thought. “That sounds like an impossible goal.” Sabre ends the article by saying, “2732 Words. That’s all you need to write every day to make it to one million words per year.”
I thought about NaNoWriMo, which has a word-count requirement of 1667 during November. For years, I have attempted to complete a novel in November, but I’ve never been successful, and one of the reasons is because of the word count. It’s hard to fit in when working full-time, and now that I’m pursuing a post-bacc degree in Creative Writing, my time is even more limited. I didn’t even try last year.
Yesterday, I updated two blog entries and wrote a poem. Curious, I did a word count. I was surprised that I had written 1,122 words. If I include two pages of journal writing (by hand), that adds approximately another 400 words. So I created a Word Count spreadsheet. I’m trying to decide if I want to try and hit that 2,700+ daily goal, or if I just want to collect data, see how much I write every day.
Speaking of writing every day, one thing that Sabre discusses in his article is the importance of “showing up every day.” He doesn’t mean this literally – although if your schedule allows for you to write every day, that’s great. Or you may decide to write on weekdays only. Whatever days you choose, you have to keep the commitment you made to yourself – you have to show up whether you want to or not.
One of my poetry instructors shared the best idea with me. She has a document that she calls “The Document.” It’s a catch-all for phrases or bits of writing that she removed from pieces she’s editing or revising. She doesn’t want to get rid of that work because it might come in handy in other pieces of writing. So on those days where you show up even though you don’t want to, and feel like you have written crap as a result, don’t get rid of it – throw that stuff into your Document!
Since I’m in the process of reviving this blog, I want to use it to show up every day and write. I’m writing what comes to mind and publishing it without much editing. After a few days, I’ll come back to these posts, revise and refine. I’ll keep up with writing in my journal – here’s why:
Isn’t that beautiful? Also:
That is a fountain pen with a left-handed nib, Dear Reader! And the ink color is “Pearlescent Magenta Red – Silver,” so it shimmers. How can I resist using these lovely items?
Sono vostro schiavo,
Babz
Babz's Blog 