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Writing Advice That Really Works
I’ve heard this advice in different forms for 20+ years. But now I’m taking it.
I was mindlessly scrolling Twitter one day and came across a tweet by Neil Gaiman (I think). I couldn’t find the tweet again, so I am paraphrasing here.
If you write a few hundred words a day, you will finish one book every year. Most people write one book every never, so you are doing great.
This advice hit me upside the head. I have a book I’ve been working on for over a year. I had a goal to finish by June 30. Then September 30. Then November 30. Then December 31. For 2021 I’m taking this self-imposed deadline away and changing my writing goal to something simple: write every day.
When I had an arbitrary deadline for finishing my book, I would think about my book all the time but actually wrote about once a week. However, I felt that I was working on it all the time. You fellow writers know what I’m talking about, right? We live and breathe our books. Did you know living and breathing a book is different than actually typing words into a computer? Not me!! During Nanowrimo, I put a sad 5K words into my book. But I thought about it a lot, so props for that I guess?
Writing consistently has been a challenge for me. A few months ago, I started taking @shauntagrimes advice to commit to writing just 10 min a…
