www.andrewmackay.net:

Get it? Habits? Hehe. You can laugh.

So, writing habits. I have a history of being a spotty writer. 5,000 words one week, nothing for three weeks after that. I’m learning that if I can make myself establish a consistent effort in my writing, I’m a lot more likely to make significant progress on my work. This runs contrary to the romantic theory I’d tried. That theory says that you just “wait for inspiration to strike,” and the whole book pours out at once. I mean, I guess it could happen that way for some people, but can you imagine? I’d feel especially bad for the people who write 200k + words per book. Think of how that’d go for Robert Jordan’s later Wheel of Time books!

I made the conservative estimate the other day that if I had waited for inspiration to strike, I might be 8000 words into the book I’m trying to write. A start to the story, perhaps, but roughly 1/4 of what I’ve written using a “write daily” approach.

So, I did some research. I used the king of all resources, Google. I found some interesting (if true) facts. (A lot of these came from this article at authormagazine.org.) Like, Hemingway, apparently, aimed for five hundred words a day.

/begin narcissistic detour/ That’s actually the goal I’ve set for myself as well. There are days where I double and triple that, but I try not to go to bed without getting at least 500 words on paper. /end narcissism/

Jack London, on the other hand, wrote between 1,000 and 1,500 words a day. Here’s my favorite: Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings over 11 years. That’s approximately 245 words a day, if you average it out.

Of course, there’s no way that my 500 words are as creative and well thought out as Tolkien’s 245. I also don’t have the massive amount of research and world creation that he had. But, it’s still neat to think that the raw production of it was accomplished by a sustained effort over a fairly long period of time.

I’m convinced, too, that it will be a sustained effort that actually converts me from a writer into a published author. It may not be my first book or even my fifteenth book, but if I keep at it and learn with each one, I think the rest will come.

So, this is a topic I expect to come back to, but for now, that’s writing habits.

Tags: writing, writing habits

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