Apr 26, 2010 
I just got back from a trip to New York City, in which I got to hang out with my friend Ellen and crash on her couch, which was, as always, far more awesome than it sounds like it should be. I love staying with her. I beg her every time to go to Alice’s Teacup, a fantastic tea house in the city, and she obliges like the long-suffering, scone-loving good friend she is. I was there to see sjmaas for her bridal shower, and actually managed to surprise her, which was one of the most fun things I’ve done in a LONG time. It was an extremely busy weekend, and also involved some staying out significantly past my bedtime, and I am now way exhausted. I met some fabulous people, though, who I can’t wait to catch up with again in a month.
The thing I’m proud of, however, is that despite all this (and having only a tiny little keyboard with which I was totally unfamiliar) I managed to keep up my daily writing minimum of 500 words.
For the past couple of years I’ve been kind of screwing around, and not producing words at any kind of consistent rate. It took that much time, a lot of self-hatred and doubt, some serious soul- searching, and then a couple great kicks in the pants by sjmaas and Corry to make me realize that I had to get serious if I wanted to make this my job.
I’d always avoided word count goals, and did so in a totally pretentious way that I wasn’t aware of at the time. I considered myself to be beautifully erratic and artistic, unchained by the daily grind, above all that mundane stuff. I didn’t just write, I got Inspired. I had a muse. She graced me with her presence, was a fragile and inconstant thing, and could not be summoned.
That’s just total bullshit, seriously.
Of course I didn’t actually think of it that way, I just told myself that I don’t work like that, and that everyone’s different. That much is true. But I decided to give a daily word count goal a try after said kicks in the pants, and with some help from lilykaufman settled on my current system. She knows me so well that she knew what would work for me before I did.
My daily goal is 1,000 words. If I write at least 1,000 words I can feel really good about myself. But, because my subconscious is totally capable of wriggling out of anything, I have to give myself some wiggle room. Some days I just don’t buy in, I just don’t feel like it. I’m sick, I’m traveling, I had a rough day, a bug flew in my eye, I put my pants on backwards.
So I have a daily minimum, as well. I have to write at least 500 words every day, no excuses. If I ended up in the hospital I’d have to get someone to bring me a notepad. The beauty of it is that anyone can write 500 words. You can do that in ten minutes if you really wanted to. There’s no guarantee it’ll be good words, but you can get them out. If after 500 words I’m still not feeling it, I stop and try again the next day. But the great part is that usually, if I sit down and force myself to start, I get way into it by the time the 500 word mark rolls around, and I’ll hit somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 words in that sitting.
I think most writers are interested in the methods of other writers–I know I am. I tended to think we were all the same when I was a kid, so I love seeing how other writers do things just completely differently from the way I do them. What do you do?
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500 words really is nothing. And even if those words stink, you can go back and polish them up (which usually leads to an extra 20+ words!). That’s a actually a great way of seeing it. X is my goal, but Y is my minimum. I think I’ll try that. 🙂
I hope it works for you! I love it, it’s the only way I can get myself to be consistent, and that’s something I really struggle with. If you’re going to make it your job, I really believe you need to find a way to do that (if you don’t happen to be born with superhuman willpower already).
The approach I use depends on where I’m up to. My WIP was a child of NaNoWriMo (which you are doing with me in November, this is your formal warning), so the first time around, I was all about the word count. Now I’m painstakingly revising, so the focus isn’t on getting words on the page, it’s about nit-picking and considering whether I’ve got the /right/ words on the page. So for now, I instead make sure I spend a minimum half hour a day with all my IMs turned off and everything out of the way to work. I really think it’s all about momentum, though — if you make one excuse, it’s so easy to make two.
Yeah, I have no idea what I’m going to do once I hit revisions for my WIP. On the possibility that I’m still doing this 500-1000 words a day thing, I probably won’t want to break it, so I’ll probably have to start Book #2 and then go back and revise Book #1 after I’ve written each day.
But you are completely and totally right about momentum. That’s really what it is. I know mine would fall apart if I ever allowed myself to weasel out of a day.