#WritingWednesday – Consistency and accountability
For the Week of 1/21/13-1/27/13
So, a lot of last week was spent catching up. Catching up at home. Catching up at work. Catching up with friends. Catching up on drama. Catching up on podcasts.
Despite my best intentions the 20 hours of air travel I experienced two weeks ago did not afford me as much opportunity as I would have liked to catch up on my podcast listening. This despite the fact that my queue currently holds almost 6 hours of back log from a new feed to which I had only recently subscribed.
But as I worked to catch up, I came upon Mur Lafferty’s mini cast about the Magic Spreadsheet. This had me intrigued and I was not prepared for the power and motivation it would provide me.
Last week I projected a 2,500 word week. But as I look over the totals I am pleased to say I passed that mark and hit 4,349 words on the week.
Thank you Magic Spreadsheet. Thats it for the update, but if you’re interested in some further discussion about this, please…
I suppose it’s odd that I should be thanking a shared google document on which people (many many many people) post their daily word count. No big deal right?
Oh… yeah! I can score points! POINTS I TELL YOU!
Every day you write 250 words you score a point. Up that to 500 and you get two. 1,000 gives you three and 2000 gives you four. But more importantly, you also get points for every consecutive day you have written at least 250 words. So if I have written 250 today, and written at least that many for each of the past 8 days, I just scored nine whole points!
Now the points are meaningless mind you. They don’t give me an award when I hit a certain level and I can’t cash them in for free airline miles. But POINTS!
It’s like my favorite nanny once said -
In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and – SNAP – the job’s a game!
If anyone tells you that writing is not a job, they have clearly never written anything in their life. Whether it’s a simple five paragraph composition for middle school, a term paper, masters thesis, or a full length novel, writing is hard. Writing is tedious, especially in those moments when you’re just plowing through the word count even though the muse is being a fickle bitch.
But when something like the magic spreadsheet comes around and brings a different community angle to the writing habit, things change. First, there as a certain level of accountability. With the word count being shared on a daily basis, everyone can see what you did and did not do and there is a certain level of… pride… to be had in continuing the streak… because you know… if Mur Lafferty can carry a streak over 52 days then I sure as hell can carry a streak into a second week. Then it becomes fun to see how long I can maintain it.
Oh and POINTS!
For as arbitrary as the point system is, it’s a neat way to track and quickly distill how sucessful you’ve been and while the only prize is a lot of words written and a completed manuscript, it still becomes competitive. Because damn…If I write 250 words and score my one point… I can easily write another 250 and get that second point. And after that it’s only 500 more words to the third point! And I’d better maintain a daily writing chain because once I break that chain… all those chain points I have? Well that tally restarts to 0… and while I won’t lose the ones I’ve already earned… I will have to spend the next X days rebuilding that chain to where it was and look at all those points I could have earned that I wont.
POINTS!
So yeah… I’m liking the Daily Writing Challenge and the magic spreadsheet. It’s proving to be a great motivator and I see good things coming down in the future.
And speaking of the future… I’m going to call for a 4,000 word week coming up.
Lets see if I hit it!
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