Category: Learning curve

I just realized how badly I contradicted myself in my last post. :D

Mini-habits.

There’s this thing I do where I set the kitchen timer to run while my tea or coffee brews. By the time the buzzer goes off, I’m usually always doing something else, so I jump up, go into the kitchen, put on my pot holder and open the oven.

Yes, I know. There’s nothing in the oven. But that’s what habits will do to you. I’ve watched myself do this time and again, and yet I still do it without thinking.

That’s why I’m starting to think habits might be the answer to the question of how to get myself writing consistently and regularly long-term.

A few days ago, I started trying to add some habits to my day that will lead to long-term changes. Mini habits. Something I decided to try after reading an article by Stephen Guise at developgoodhabits.com.

Right now, I’m focused on consistency, so I picked a teeny tiny number of words and got started habit building.

My daily goal is to write 50 words (of fiction) before lunch.

I also set a goal to read 2 pages of fiction a day. This fits in with my goal to read more fiction this year. :)

I now have 7 consecutive days of writing behind me. I got my 50 today (133 actually) somewhere between writing the first paragraph of this post and the last. :D

And it feels GOOD. ;)

Well. There’s a nice side-effect for me. Thinking about my upcoming day, I feel calm. Days where I feel calm are rare enough that I definitely notice them. :) Makes me happy.

I’m posting from my Kindle again. I didn’t really get much more done last night. I’ll update the accountability numbers when I can update at the computer. It’s a lot easier than this.

Too many storms last night! I’m already tired and I haven’t even got out of bed yet.

The new rule is helping me with another bit of restructuring I’m trying to do—stop reading so much crap online! :D Overloading my brain every spare moment I have has been squashing my creativity. Just no room left to daydream and be creative!

Well, time to get this day started. :)

… Since I haven’t reached 2,000 words, I’m posting this little update from my Kindle. It was probably a terrible idea to start this new rule while I’m trying to finish a book. Ahem. During times like these, I’m known to delete as much as I write. I’m sitting at 1,036 words for the day right now.

I really wish I had the capability of sitting down and just staying with something until I got it done.

Anyway. I’m not quitting yet, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll hold out. It’s already my bedtime. :D

I’m switching stories to see if I can get some momentum going. See ya!

I made myself a new rule, something super simple.

I can’t do anything on the computer that’s not directly publishing related until I’ve done a minimum of writing for the day, probably about 2,000 words. (So I can reach my weekly goal.)

And that is why I’m writing and posting this from my smartphone before I’ve even gotten out of bed. :D

But truthfully speaking, I actually think that simple rule will help a lot.

Yesterday, I failed to write, because I got distracted by websites and reading things online. I did manage to knock something publishing related off my to do list that had been there since 2012, so it wasn’t an all bad day. :D

Time to wrap this up. Editing and writing on my phone is a pain in the ass!

Not that the fault belongs to Microsoft Word. No, the fault is mine.

I meant to get started writing about an hour ago, but I started messing with the former book in the novella series so I could update the back matter (my list of books, my bio, blah blah), and I realized my styles are not matching up, which made me want to create a new style set (again, not like I don’t already have a ton of them), and then I ended up looking up the Microsoft Office help pages so I could see if I’m missing something in my understanding of styles and style sets and templates (oh, I definitely am, even though I know enough to have created about 10 style sets of my own).

This is all for Word 2007. I toy with the idea of upgrading, but  I haven’t because I’m pretty happy with this version.

In the meantime, I’ve wasted a lot of good writing time on something that would take very little time to do, if I could figure out where I need to start to combine the quick styles I definitely need into one new style set, so I can just delete most of the rest of them.

Let’s see, it’s 9:58 a.m. and I’m going to see if I can get this done within 10 minutes before I drive myself crazy with it.

And later…

10:31 a.m. to be exact. I’ve got a new style set for my ebooks and I think it’s going to work. I’ve made a note to delete the old style sets (not the print style sets yet) once I’m sure I’m happy with this new set.

Not 10 minutes but close enough! :D

So last night and this morning I read Writing in Overdrive (which I really liked, btw) and I came away from the book with the feeling that maybe I don’t know what “fast” means when it comes to writing.

I’ve been daydreaming about hitting daily word counts of 5,000 and 6,000 for a while, and there’s definitely this part of me that thinks this should be a daily thing. Maybe weekends off. But maybe not.

And I have to ask myself, in what world is this realistic?

What kind of writer writes 5,000 words every day? That’s 1,825,000 words a year.

Where’d I get the idea that this is something I even want?

I mean, I could write a new novel every month at around 2,000 words a day. A new novel every month.

At 4,000 words a day, I’d be pumping out two novels everymonth. Or one massive 120,000 word novel.

I have no idea why I’ve fixated on 5,000 words a day. No idea.

When I won NaNoWriMo in 2010 with just a hair over 50,000 words, I thought I’d done something amazing.  When I decided to go back to writing original works so I could try publishing in 2012, I thought I was really accomplishing something when I wrote 56,287 words in two months. I was so sure I was writing a significant enough number of words that I quit my job to start writing full-time. Let me repeat that: I quit my job based on me being able to write about 25,000 words a month.

I have to wonder when I decided it was such a great idea to put so much pressure on myself that I feel like I’ve started to avoid writing, even though I love writing stories. Why have I let my critical self run roughshod over my creative self by focusing so strongly on word counts and hourly output and self-imposed deadlines?

What have I been thinking?

Then there’s the idea that I’m a slow writer at my average 551 words per hour.

I’ve been dreaming of consistently writing 1,000 words an hour for a while now. I’ve done it a few times, but I don’t like it when I push for it. It’s happened a few times when I haven’t pushed for it, and those times were fun. But when I tried to force it? It was too stressful, and I didn’t like how it felt at all. It made writing very much unfun.

There were several passages within Writing in Overdrive that made me question what kind of hourly output I should be expecting from myself.

In chapter 1, Jim Denney talks about Ray Bradbury:

He averaged about five and a half typing hours per day, totaling 49 hours of typewriter time at a cost of about $9.80 in dimes. His daily output averaged about 2,800 words. “It was a passionate and exciting time for me,” he recalled in an article for UCLA Magazine.

…

Bradbury believes in writing quickly, intuitively, explosively, and passionately.

I’m left wondering if 2,800 words in five and a half hours is considered fast? If not fast, I think it’s safe to assume from the context that it’s not slow. At just over 514 words an hour that means…

I’m plenty fast enough.

I actually feel a lot better.

It’s really time I stop worrying about how “fast” a writer I am and just get back to having fun when I write so I can develop a good, strong writing habit.

Also, I definitely feel like I made the right decision to drop the time quota. :)

Set goals that are focused on creativity and productivity, not merely on putting in the time. “I will write from nine until noon” is not a goal — it’s a schedule.

LOL. You better believe I highlighted that. ;)

I keep an eye on my writing totals on a weekly basis—not that I log weekly totals in my daily word count log or anything. I just like to have a weekly goal, and now I’m trying to focus on that weekly goal even more.

I’ve been comfortable using a Saturday–Friday week, because I thought—irrationally?—that by putting the weekend days at the beginning of my week, I’d have fewer weekends where I try to work all weekend and catch up on my weekly writing word count goals.

Uh, no. Not even close to reality.

What’s been happening is that I’ve been telling myself it’s okay to slack off on the weekends, because they’re the first two days of the week, and I can catch up on Monday and Tuesday—which I never seem to do.

I’m still within the first two years of my writing career. I have to publish semi-regularly to make money, or I’ll go broke. So which problem seems more like a real problem here: writing too much on the weekends or not writing enough?

Yeah. I had that same thought, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking. :D

I’m shifting it back to Monday—Sunday.

Hmm. Time for some conclusions!

The word count issues I keep coming up against are just a symptom of a bigger issue. Time. Time is where I’m falling short and letting myself down.

I mean, it doesn’t change the fact that procrastination is still a problem—truly, a symptom of a different issue, or that I still have to work on motivating myself, blah, blah, blah, but worrying about word counts without worrying about the amount of time I’m devoting to my writing seems very short-sighted.

There’s a solution to my word count woes and it’s a simple one. Spend more time writing. :D

My focus should be on consistently putting in more time. Back in February 2012, I had a fantastic month—a month of the most consistent writing output I’ve ever had (truly, ever). I averaged over three hours of writing a day. That kind of consistency could do wonders for my writing and my income. More practice, more published stories, more money.

If I want to be sure I put in more time consistently, then I need structure.

It’s time to start writing every day.

WIFI is hard to resist! Why else would I be online right now when I intended to try to write for another half hour?

Getting the WIFI turned off is the easy part—keeping it turned off is where I’m running into problems.

And once it’s on, there’s always just … one … more … little … thing … to … check. Just one more.

Strangely enough, I’ve been blogging a lot lately, even if I haven’t been posting those posts (hereafter to be called b-logs). :D

I’ve been using Evernote (which I’m still doing for this one, tbh) and just writing the b-logs the same as I was doing on the site, and holding them with the intent of posting when I turned my WIFI back on. But it’s gotten kind of out of control, and I don’t feel a strong desire to post more than a dozen backdated b-logs.

It’s been a relatively good month. I’ve also had a few relatively bad days with my novella. I’m stuck on it, and I’ve had a hell of a time with it since January.

My current experiment

At the moment, I’m schedule free; the way I’ve been working has been working so well for me that I haven’t needed a schedule. :D Happy days…

A few weeks ago, I decided to try writing on multiple stories at once, every day, 800–1,000 words on each of 4 to 6 stories for 3,200–6,000 words.

I’ve increased the number of words I write daily, even if I haven’t been able to work on more than 3 stories most days, or get higher than 3,374 words in one day. But my daily average for April is currently my fifth highest out of twenty-one months of writing. I’ve also finished a novelette and made real progress on one of my bigger novels I need to finish in the next month or two.

I’ve been happy with this, and it’s kept me writing at a nice pace. It feels easy and I don’t know that I can ask for more than that with the lack of motivation to write I’d been feeling the last few months.

Here’s what I do (or try to do)

When I hit a wall with my concentration on one story, I switch to another. I try to do this instead of check email, forums, and blogs for a quick distraction that always ends up being a major time sink.

That’s pretty much the sum total of how I’m handling the different stories.

A lot of times, the writing feels easier when I go back to a story I was working on earlier than it did right before I switched, as if the switch loosened something up and I can now keep going without the same drag I was feeling when I hit the wall. And that’s it.

Week before last, I made it over 3,000 words on 3 days, and over 2,000 on 3 days. I ended that week with my highest 7-consecutive-day total to date of 18,049 words.

Last week wasn’t as good. I lost a big chunk of words when I decided to revisit my languishing novella and cut over 5,000 words from it. I’ve mentioned before that my spreadsheets immediately take deletions into account, and it knocked me back so that I ended last week with 4,523 words.

I had hoped this week would start off well, but it hasn’t. I got stuck on the novella and I haven’t been able to let it go. I’m dragging myself down as I agonize over that book.

I need to finish it; it’s a sequel I’ve already said I was writing; but I can’t seem to get unstuck on it. I’m even toying with the idea of deleting the whole thing and starting over, only I’m not sure how I’d do any better a job with it if I did that. This might be a case of just finishing it and putting it out there so I can get it off my mind.

All that aside, it’s time to get to work. I have stories to write. :D It’s raining today and I like writing to the sound of rain. I’m going to do a separate b-log with today’s summary of progress. Just easier that way! ;D

I’ve been reading Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Daniel H. Pink), and although I’m not very far into the book, there’ve been a few lines that have stood out as particularly relevant to me.

“Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.”

Of course, the first thing that happened when I read this was I had a strong desire to go make myself a cup of coffee. Then I pondered on the words and it only took me a few seconds to realize I see this happening in my life, a lot. I push aside intrinsic motivation in favor of extrinsic motivation all the time.

I’m already wondering what else this book is going to suggest about the carrot & stick approach to motivation. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s anything here to change how I try to motivate myself to write more.