It’s Like a Muscle

Logically I know that if I work out regularly, my muscles will grow stronger. If I practice piano regularly, I’ll slowly improve my sight-reading, my playing, and even the muscle memory in my hands. If I write regularly then…

I’m amazed that we treat our brains differently than we do the rest of our bodies. They’re not muscles, exactly, but like muscles, if we regularly expose our brains to something, they will get better at processing, at taking things in, and at sharing that information back.

I logically know this about writing. The more regular I am in the practice, the easier it gets. But there’s a resistance if I’ve been away from it for a while. And just like working out, if I can break through that resistance, everything flows a lot easier from there.

As I wrote last time, my daily goal every weekday is to write 1500 words. That’s a lot of words streaming from my brain, down my fingertips, through the keys, and onto the computer screen. The first few days were looooong! It took hours to reach my goal and I was barely able to get in other work afterwards.

But after a few days, those 1500 words came in four hours instead of five, then a couple of days later, those four hours were down to three and a half, then down to three, and now, as of this post, I wrote 1800+ words in three hours and I’m writing this post before lunch.

I’m not saying I won’t have rough writing days or that there won’t be days that still take me six hours instead of three. But I am saying it’s only been a week and a half of this schedule where I make writing the first priority of my workday…and I’m already seeing a massive improvement in how my brain spits stuff out.

Hopefully, that’s an encouragement to you too. That if you break through the resistance to even start something, you can see improvement in a short period of time.

Now, is the writing any good? I guess time will tell.

Blessings,

Jennifer

P.S. As of this post, my rough draft is up to 63,395 words. My goal is 100,000 but Quaking Soul topped out at 138K in rough form, so we’ll see if 100K is enough to finish the sequel =)