1000
While most people took the shutdown time of 2020 as an opportunity to read, for whatever reason I did not. Usually a reader of 10-12 books a year, I had no interest and read 3/4 of one book in 2020. Less than one. To be fair, I did listen to hours of podcasts and maybe a book or two, but as far as picking one up and losing myself. None.
Over Christmas this year I resolved to fix that but still struggled to find anything I wanted to read. Clearly this was from a lack of looking and not from a lack of options. In an effort to use what I have, I went to my bookcase and found Stephen King’s, On Writing, a pseudo how too write/history of his career. Yesterday, during the great freeze of 2021, my phone died for 8 hours and I finished it.
This isn’t to be a recap of it. If you’re interested, read it yourself. I will spoil the “how to” portion though and give you his steps to becoming a good writer. Read a lot. Write a lot. That’s it.
There is no “get away to the mountains and create a special nook overlooking a creek”, advice. No tricks. No magic. Read more books. Write more.
Color me unsurprised. With just about everything in life, the answers are simple and logical and sitting in front of your face. If you want to get better at anything, do it more. Dedicate the time and effort and eventually you will improve.
This isn’t to say that you can get to be good at everything you try. Better. Sure. Good? Well unfortunately, no.
Not everyone can get good at music, for instance. You can get more proficient at it for sure, but some people suck at it and that improvement just brings them to being less sucky at it.
As a runner of 20+ years I understand this dilemma personally. Am I better than I was on day one? Yes. Am I good at it? No. Two decades of running and I still can run about the same mile time as my fastest (about 36 years old). I know infinitely more about running and I’ve received twenty years of other benefits. A good runner? I am not.
Another spoiler that’s not a surprise. The amount of writing that constitutes “a lot” for King is 4x my daily output, WHEN I’m actually writing daily. For 2019 I averaged nearly 500 words a day, even less in 2020 due to “less days”. I say “nearly” because I didn’t go back and count, but I wrote almost every day and I began falling into a natural stopping point of 500-600 words. It seemed to be about how long any idea or thought I had would play out, and I almost began “feeling” like I should start wrapping things up around the 450 word mark. To this day, this is where I do wrap it up, but recently I’ve noticed that impatience and anxiety to fit in other things (workouts, work, etc.) force my wrap ups, regardless of whether the thought has run its course or not. This does the process a disservice and if I wish to improve and get an actual book done (I keep speaking this with hope it brings reality) then I have to keep pressing on.
What this will mean for me is that I may have to sit on the content for a day or, gasp, for weeks and months. When I started this endeavor in earnest back in ‘19 the thing that made writing real was the “publishing”. The “release” portion of the catch and release of my ideas. Without it, how would you know that I even caught anything? Of course this is a part of the swirling social media-internet-dopamine-release game we’ve all unwittingly become a part of. I freely admit that. It could be worse. I could do heroin. But this is a real thing, and if I am to become a better writer, there will need to be different strategies and items of import.
Short term, I’m not sure this matters terribly much with relation to “how I do things”. I haven’t settled on any sort of thing to write other than what I write now. Whatever that’s defined as. I can commit to more of it by volume. I can’t tell you I’m going to tie all of it together under a big theme or idea. To that end this means little ideas can seep out on the daily. A morphine drip of self congratulatory delight delivered (lately) through the memories of the 1980’s. That will likely run its course at some point as I can only remember so much.
What I am left with this morning really are questions. How much do I want to “be a writer”? What does “being a writer” even mean? I feel like I’m doing that already. I do know that the consistency of 2019 and the first part of 2020 made me a better one so getting back to that is a good jumping off point. I also believe that I should let ideas expand a little. I don’t have to cut things off at 500 words, a Frank Costanza short stop on the ideas driven by the need to show you how clever and smart and introspective I am before I move on to the rest of my day.
There’s also the practical issues of “having a job” and a dozen other things I aspire to mediocrity at. What am I willing to sacrifice? Something will have to give as there are only so many hours in the day. Anyone want to cook 150 meals a week for me?
What I’ve settled on is 1000 words, five days a week. With a caveat that i can share it or not. This will be roughly double my production and a goal that most would say surely sets me up for failure. Fortunately, this is a setting I’m familiar with. It also allows for exploration of ideas for a book. Some days I’ll push out a complete thought. Other days, until I’ve made things concrete, I’ll set it aside and add to my “idea to send Oprah”.
Day 1. 1063 words. I’ll call that a success.
#hugsandhi5s
