Day: March 28, 2015

32 day streak

Lynn

I’m now at 32 days of writing fiction every day. Unlike with previous streaks, this one has no quotas, time or words. My plan is simply to see how many consecutive days I can make it writing fiction every day.

Really and truly, getting started is the hardest part for me. When I do get started, I usually do better than I expect. Like last night. I thought I’d get nothing, but then I decided I wanted to keep my streak alive, want, in fact, to create the best streak I’ve ever had, so I started writing. 439 really decent words later I stopped and went to bed because time had gotten away from me. (A really good thing when it comes to writing.)

I’ve said before, if I eliminate all the zero word days I’ve had in the past and replace them with as little as 50 words, I could have written 15,000 words more than I have since I started writing to publish. If that number had averaged 200 words, that’s an entire extra novel.

Averages are powerful things and I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine I could average 200 words a day for all those days that might be zero word days otherwise.

My ultimate goal is still to reach and maintain a 2,000 word a day average, but these small steps are helping me get there. After a really bad streak of low productivity that lasted more than a year, I’m happy to see improvement.

Why I don’t offer writing tips (most of the time)

Lynn

I’ve been writing for about twenty-five years. It’s really funny that fifteen years ago, I had a site devoted to giving out writing tips. Nowadays I don’t feel qualified to give out writing tips, despite the length of time I’ve been writing fiction. Or maybe it’s that I’ve learned in the meantime that writing tips are a bit worthless. I only discovered true happiness with writing when I finally tossed aside all the tips that had taken up residence inside my head and wrote what I wanted, how I wanted. Sadly, that’s only been in the last ten years or so.

I freely admit that maybe I needed those tips at the time so that I could become the writer I am today. Then again, maybe they delayed my development as a writer. I’ll likely never know.

I also freely admit that I am far from done learning how to write. The difference these days is that I learn from reading others and practicing my own craft, trying to find ways to get the words out so they translate best to the biggest portion of my reading audience. (You can never please everyone, and you’ll go mad if you try.) That’s not to say I don’t read select craft books, because I do. But I avoid the kind of tips that proliferate online in favor of in-depth discussions of topics meant to help writers write good stories.

How can I offer advice to others when I still have so much to learn?

Still, sometimes I want to say to some writers I see scouring the forums and blogs for the secret to better writing: Stop! Just write. Write and write and write, and complete things. Even the terrible things. Finish those stories you start, because that’s how I learned. I took a giant leap forward when I finally started finishing the stories I started.

In the end, though, I have no idea if what worked for me will work for them. Maybe they need those tips. Or maybe they’re just delaying their own development as writers. We’ll likely never know.

I don’t offer writing tips because I don’t feel qualified. I know only what works for me as a reader and a writer. And I use adverbs when I want and I write run on sentences and I quite often mix my metaphors. But it’s what I want and how I want and my writing hasn’t been the same since. It’s lovely to own your art as uniquely yours.