Day 1 of Writing 9,000 Words
One of the biggest traps a writer can fall into is believing that their work needs to be incredible the first time around. That’s the kind of thinking where writer’s block is born.
Today I officially started a full week off of work, and boy, did I hit the ground running.
Yesterday, I sat down with my wife to plan out the week. I didn’t want to just waste the week away; I wanted to make something of it. So I came up with a crazy idea. What if I set a goal to write 9,000 words a day until I finish the first draft of my latest novel, Echo Island 2?
Here’s what I planned:
First, I’d break each day into three writing sessions, aiming for about 3,000 words per session, or about one chapter. Second, I’d take healthy breaks in between. No social media, video games, or movies. Instead, I needed to fill the time taking walks, eating meals, and taking a 15-minute nap or two.
Well, here I am at the end of day one, and I did it! Mostly.
Not everything went according to plan. Session one went by without a problem. Session two went pretty smoothly, but by Session Three I started stumbling. It started with my second 15-minute nap of the day. That’s because instead of 15 minutes, I accidentally slept for 3 hours. Ouch.
You know how you take a long nap, wake up, then your brain feels like it just got trampled by 37 wild buffalo? Yeah… that was me today. Long story short, my third writing session got split into two with ample procrastination during and in between. I got there eventually, but it was an exhausting battle the entire way.
Which brings me to a final point I want to address. I’m sure some of you following this challenge are wondering how this impacts my writing. If you’re like me, you want to know if it’s dropping the quality. The truth? I think it is. I genuinely believe that session one produces much smoother, polished work.
The thing is, that’s okay.
I had a professor in college that repeatedly taught that good writing is good revision. That’s why I don’t care about the quality drop during a challenge like this. Will it need more cleaning up later? Sure. But hey, at least I have something there to polish.
