Just some thoughts about the writing bandwagon and what I’ve been up to of late.
I had a pretty good writing day yesterday. Not stellar, but I got pretty close to the 1000 word mark, and generally that’s a pretty good thing. Some people, myself included, occasionally brag about 2k or even 2.5k days, and while those days can feel really good and really cathartic, it’s not sustainable (one of the reason’s I’m not a fan of NaNoWriMo) and therefore not a good, realistic, or otherwise healthy goal. My thought is if you need to write more than 1k words a day (on a single project) for more than like 2 days on end, cut something out: switch your days off, alter your sleep schedule, reorganize your priorities. Something.
While I’m preaching, I’d also say that while you need to touch big projects daily in order to keep them active in your mind, if you’re not writing something like 1000 words a week on a project, it’s probably fallow and you should reconsider your priorities and regroup. Clearly I’m being a little prescriptive, there are kinds of writing where this won’t hold up, or it holds up differently. Poets and some short fiction writers, journalists, academic writing all have different thresholds and what not, but I think the general line of even if you can’t write on a project you should give it consideration and thought every single day, and also be sure to make actual concrete process on that project regularly. Your millage may vary.
Today, I haven’t yet done as well, though I suspect there’s time yet to get writing done, so I’m not yet final. When I’m thinking about this, though, I’ve realized that I tend to keep track of one word count. How much I’ve written in the one big project, not how much I write at all, or how other projects fare. Particularly if you count this blog post, but probably even if you don’t, I’ve gotten way way past the 1k goal: I have a knitting pattern that I’ve been working on for a few days that I finally knocked out. Surely that counts for something. ;)
I made a post a couple days ago about boyfriends and how (mostly as a result of heteronormativity) that sometimes it can be hard to be a “single queer.” The parallel to this is writing and writers. It’s hard to be a writer if you’re not writing. I mean clearly there are a lot of things in the world that prevent people who write from getting writing done, but I’m certainly not one to make the point that writers write and authors talk about what they wrote, you can’t be a writer if you don’t write.
I’m not sure how well these models and the analogy hold up, but, maybe there’s something there. Anyway, I have things that need doing, so I’m going to get, but I just wanted to throw this out there.
Onward and Upward!