Competition

Hi. My name is Kate Larking and I am a competitive author.

I’ve always been competitive. I think it’s how I function on a basic level: compete with everyone and everything. I am always going to be a sore loser. I have a tendency to sulk for hours–days. It’s the most moronic tendency I have.

And it helps me get shit done.

I word war. A lot. People call them all sorts of things: sprints, writing wars, word-offs. But it generally boils down to the same thing: write as much as you can in a set amount of time.

Online, I war with friends over facebook messenger. I also war in a chatroom with a few other authors who I admire. This means that they crush me a lot–a lot. But the beautiful thing about word wars is the victory time. Five to ten minutes of dancing, celebrating your victory, and then you have to get going all over again. Clean slate. Wrote a lot of words last time? Prove your mettle and do it again. Wrote too few? You’re warmed up now. Write ‘em out!

In person, I war when friends come over with laptops. I am a part of Write Club in Calgary. We set up shop in a cafe on Sunday nights and try to beat the shit out of each other’s numbers, all while caffeinating heavily to earn our stay at the cafe.

It can be any amount of time. 5 minutes to 30 minutes or more. Usually 30 is the longest you can stretch it with multiple people; we all start to doze off or zone out after that.

When I think about writing, if I contact people to get warring, it makes me invested. It makes me accountable for butt-in-chair, fingers-on-keyboard. I asked someone to show up so I could try and show off. So it’s time to write up or shut up.