A Daily Writing Schedule

Certain things stick in my head, becoming mantras, and as I share them with others, and others do likewise, they can become memes. A successful writer at a workshop I once attended said, "If you want to be a writer, write. You can fix a bad page, but you can't fix a blank page." She went on to suggest that a daily writing practice of as little as 300 words a day will provide you with 365 x 300 = 109,500 words in a year, provided you do what she said, which is to 'write forward' - easier said than done, but a great goal to keep going with new material until the first draft is done. It is possible to do that and still hold down a full-time job, provided you don't want to do anything else like watch television, go on the social media all night, and spend time with your family. Actually it is still possible, but you need to be well-disciplined, want to do it, and have something to say. You can cut that hundred thousand words down to between 70,000 and 80,000 and you have a novel sized book of around 250 pages. Of course, by that stage, they need to be good pages, and the right words in the right order - at least from your perspective.

I think there is value in daily goal-setting, in writing forward and in progressing the story in a linear way. I wish I could do it, but my process seems to consist of (yes) daily writing practice, but not actually writing forward as a general rule, but in fits and starts, and in fact much of the writing is writing within what I already have down. And inside my own head, of course. I do have a daily writing schedule which consists of writing daily. That's it.

This week I started the new novel. Officially. I drew up a plan and stuck it on my wall. I used the table function on my word processor and painstakingly put a new date in every little square. On the first day I spent my time writing in between doing the laundry, dishes, bed, listening to an interview on the radio with a professor of microbiology on bacteria. I checked my emails, and cooked up a big pot of Dahl with some extremely hot chillies. I know all that sounds like skiving off, but I think of it as my thinking time. At the end of the day I wrote in the first little square. I have written in four little squares now. So far, so good. So far, I think I like what I've done, but I'm not showing it to anyone yet. No, not for a while.

Day five. I'd like to write forward, and I probably will - a bit. Knowing the way I go though, there will be a lot of working what I have - already, and that seems to bring new stuff in, as I take stuff out. The net result is inching forward.

Wish me luck. And if you're between projects at the moment why not start one now? Even an average of 100 words a day will get you a novella-sized manuscript by this time next year. 100 'fixed', or even 'bad' ones that you can fix.