Kim and I have a deal going right now. We have both agreed to write at least one thousand words a day. We’re both working on novels at the moment and this daily quota really helps make the job less intimidating. A commercial length novel is many tens of thousands of words long. If you think about all those words, all those pages, all that work, it can paralyze you into inactivity. But a thousand words? Pfft. I can do a thousand words in my sleep. Okay, not exactly in my sleep, but you get the idea. Take a big task and turn it into a lot of manageable little tasks.
It’s working fine. So far I have about nine thousand words done on 2D and I’m enjoying the process a lot. I do my words in the morning, as soon as I wake up, which allows me to take advantage of my slightly hypnagogic state before breakfast. Lots of creative energy there.
I find I do my best when I write every day. When I was doing poetry, I made sure I wrote at least one poem every day. I did this for three years. It was the best way to learn the craft. Now I’m doing it with prose. 1K/day. It’s a motto I can live with.
