In my January 30th post I wrote about my book structure being in 3 acts. After that, I decided to write 1000 words every day.
I have not written 1000 words a day. How do people do that? I intend to do it, I plan to do it, but quickly I get distracted with something fun or urgent or just an email from Gap, and next thing I know, I am doing busy work like updating the sales report, tasting new Treats of the Week and talking to Carly about new boxes.
But – I have written 7045 words since January 30 in big, erratic fits of energy on the days I work at home. I’ve sat down first thing in the morning, forbid myself to look at email and picked a chapter title that sounds sort of interesting. Next thing I know it is two hours later and the word count at the bottom of the page has gone up by around 1000 words. Yay!
Maybe the write-every-day approach isn’t for everyone. Having tried it, it feels a little rigid. I find that by writing in bigger chunks it feels okay to start down a path and then delete everything because it isn’t working and then start again. I like the freedom of knowing that I have allocated a whole morning to just that one thing.
Other things I have noticed:
- when I decide to stop, I feel physically tired – it’s like a workout to think so hard
- as I start writing on a topic, for example, some of the things I learned practicing law that were useful in opening PGB, I remember details and incidents; it is as if the act of writing triggers another part of one’s memory bank
- it is hard to resist the temptation to make things sound better than they were, for example, I want to say I come from a family of wonderful cooks but we put canned mushroom soup in everything and made Minute Rice. It would be wrong to lie about stuff like that.
As my friend Marilyn likes to say now that she lives in London, “more anon” on the book…and other Prairie Girl activities that on most days catch my attention way faster than the book outline.
