word count

2062

December 14, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I wake up sometimes when I am not supposed to. At the wrong time. Filled with restless energy. Sometimes epiphanies come. This morning I was filled with them. And one of them was this: I will die in the year 2062. Statistically speaking. Barring accidents, incidents, rage filled bar fights in a state of loutish drunkenness. If I do not challenge anyone to a duel that I lose between now and then and I manage not to anger god I have 17,224 days left on the planet.

We can all relate to the timespan of one day. And I find myself sitting here pondering. What will I do with today? Am I using it as wisely as I possibly can? Am I seizing each moment? Carpe diem. Seize the day. I have been alive for 16,013 days. Most of them have not been used wisely. We all juggle priorities. Live between conflicting forces. We struggle with agendas, priorities, desires. You probably have some goals in life.

I do.

Do you wake up each morning asking yourself whether those goals are the correct ones for you to find maximal meaning? Do you breathe deeply and center yourself? Review how you lived yesterday? Ask yourself what you can do to make today more of what you’d like it to be?

I do.

I have a personal goal that overrides everything else in my life. One that I want to achieve each and every day for the remaining time I have. Write 1,000 words a day. Some days I write 10,000. Some days I don’t hit the mark. But it’s nice to think that if I live to my expected timeline I have the potential to write 17 million words down. That’s a lot of stories. Maybe I won’t live that long. Perhaps I’ll live longer. I find it important to mark the time, reflect on it, understand what is passing as I move through the time stream. I find it important to capture the moments and learn from them.

Do you?

You only need three to five important goals to achieve a sense of great satisfaction from your life. Take the time to make sure they are the best goals for you. They may change over time. As you deep breathe each morning your own epiphanies may arrive. I hope they do.

I will die in 2062. Perhaps. I will have written 17 million words by then. One hopes. I will have loved, lost, fallen down, stood back up. Tomorrow the countdown timer will be 17,223 and the word count will be 1,000 closer to the 17 million mark. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less. But I’ve crunched the numbers. Whatever the actual outcomes I have marked a path. I know where I want to go. I know that I will be surprised at how different things look from what I expected when I get there. All of that is perfectly fine.

It’s malleable. This condition of being human. In 2062 I’ll have written 17 million words. I’ll have told the stories I have inside me. What will you have done with your time?

The importance of writing rituals

February 28, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

When I first started getting serious about writing, I set a goal of 1,000 words a day. Output is how you get better. I’ve long ago surpassed that target. Some days I write 7,000 words. My minimum targets now are 5,000 words a day at least five days a week. This is very achievable. I type 70 wpm, so theoretically, I could hit my mark in 71 minutes. That assumes that the story just flows automatically out of my brain like water. Unfortunately, that isn’t how stories work. Writing is art. Building a good story is just like building a good building. It’s done in a very methodical way. For anything over 1,000 words I tend to go into Scapple first and put the bones of my animal together. Scapple is a simple little software tool for Mac and PC that lets you figure out all the basics in a visual way. I tend to spend a few hours to a day working on the ideas that need to be woven together. For instance, here’s the current visual representation of Demonology, a contemporary fantasy I’m working on.

As you can see, there is more to a good story than just sitting down and letting it flow out of you. Well, for me anyhow. Stephen King might sit down and just start writing whatever is in his head. But I doubt that. I’ll bet he has a process too. Probably very different from me, because there is a generational gap and he wrote his first novel on a typewriter. Then there is Neal Stephenson, who wrote one of the most complex plots ever devised with a fountain pen. The Baroque Cycle is marketed in a silly, greedy way as three books now, but it started off as one immense tome I enjoyed mightily, as I do all of that man’s work. But I digress. The point of this post is – have a process.

If you don’t have a word goal count that you follow like the Catholic church follows the rituals of mass, you aren’t going to be a successful writer. You might write one novel, and it might even sell. But this writing thing won’t be a long-term career. You’ll need to know your tools and your process as well. You can break a million rules, but have some to break in the first place. Otherwise, you are just dreaming. The dream of being a novelist ain’t going to happen without you sitting down and pumping out prose. You’re going to need to be a word whore, and you’re going to need to be good at it.

You found this post because you either like my writing or you’re looking for writing tips. If the first, go buy a book right now and leave me a nice review so I can keep doing this. If the latter, why are you still reading. You should be writing. Go do it. But before you start, write down your word count goals. Understand your tools. And if you can’t touch type, learn that first. Unless you’re Neal Stephenson. If you are, then you should know I idolize you.

But you aren’t. So, go on. Get writing.

1,000 words per day

February 29, 2012 by Pen

It may seem obvious to you that in order to be a successful author, one must actually write. I am dense. It took me 40 years to catch on to this simple truth. When I did, I realized that goals must be set. In my current existence, I work full-time for one of the many corporate entities that make modern life a complete drudgery. Therefore, my daily word count goal is modest; 1,000 words a day is what I demand from myself. I will write 1,000 words per day no matter what. I could have just shit my pants. I may be bleeding from my nose. A gang of midget ninjas may just have snuck in through air vents I didn’t know about, beaten the hell out of me, and stolen all my money. I still have to write 1,000 words per day.

The 1,000 words per day rule is critical. If I don’t follow it, then I never finish a project. Goals are critical, and every writer should have them. Even if you are not a writer, you should have goals. Some examples:

Get laid once a week.
Stay out of jail by avoiding trouble.
Ignore all media coverage of Whitney Houston, and other self-destructive time wasters.

The point of having goals is to ensure that you get things done. People without goals end up watching a lot of Jerry Springer and some of them ending up eating a gun, or 1,000 gallons of ice cream. So then those people are either dead or rolling around the grocery store in a motorized cart, farting a lot and wishing things had turned out different.

Assuming that my first novel is going to be roughly 100K words long, it should take me 100 days to knock out the rough draft. Time to get back to it.

What about you, dear reader? Do you write? If so, what are your goals? How many words a day do you write? What rules keep you on track and focused?