Five days ago I wrote the last exam for my professional certification. While this is hugely meaningful to me, its main relevance to the Pen is that I now have the time to get back to writing.
Doing so is not as easy as one would wish. It’s been months since I’ve written regularly, so I’ve been looking at various motivation methods and drivers.
NaNoWriMo is a good example: all around the world, people start with the goal of a 50,000 word month and go. My last completed novel started as a NaNoWriMo project. Sadly, unless you’re a professional writer (in which case, 50k is probably a slow month), this is a level of commitment and push that most of us can’t put out every month.
At the smaller end of the scale is C. E. Murphy’s #1k1hr: simply put, lock yourself in your office for an hour and write, with the goal of having a thousand words at the end of it. This is something that most of us can readily do if we choose to, especially those of us without children.
I’ve always been a fan of the standard of “Write something every day. Doesn’t matter how much, write something.”
To get back into that habit, I plan to leverage 1k1hrs and a NaNoWriMo style monthly goal. Starting this December, I aim to push out 20,000 words a month. Blog posts, RPG notes, etc, don’t count – only words churned through on an actual novel count.
Working towards that goal, I’ll be doing 1k1hr shortly.
Wish me luck folks!
Glynn Stewart
You know if you do two of those a day, you’ll probabaly average 60k a month.
::cracks whip::