Howdy,
Let’s test it.
Test what, I would think you would ask?
I was thinking, What can I write in 10 minutes?
(Or 20, or 30? We’ll see what I settle in on, if I even use this approach at all in the future.)
What I did at this very minute is set the kitchen timer for 10 minutes and started typing. And, yes, it is a “let’s see” or “Let’s test it,” because I don’t know how far I will get or if what I do get will be anything, especially anything worthwhile for actually posting on my blog, but I was afraid to go for it—to give it a go. That much, at least, I’ve learned in this year of writing for 200K words and striving to publish (most) every day.
It’s a test because Sarah and I have talked about what will be next when I hit 200K words and my birthday rolls around again in October and I’ve completed this commitment and all this writing practice and blog publishing. Matt Garman and I talk about it as well.
Matt and Sarah, siblings, agree that I pick up working on my next novel as a priority, in an intensified way. And I agree with them that writing for a novel will be my focus. The test part of this post is, what will I do with my blog? How will I incorporate my blog and keep up with posting while working on a book? What sort of posting rhythm or regularity will I seek to maintain? (The beep—in only have a minute left!)
Two main thoughts on this:
1) I do want to continue to post to my blog at some frequency but without the daily push, without these posts being the priority, the pieces receiving the first fruits of my composing efforts.
(Ten minutes timer up, but I can’t end between points 1 & 2 when I purposed “two main thoughts on this,” so I set a new 10 minutes; besides, I said this was a test and also began in wondering if it would be 10, 20, or 30 minutes. A nice component in this, though, is that I got about 300 words written in that first 10 minutes, so that timed push was well worth it, quite effective and efficient for me—that is also a payoff of this year of writing more for me, getting faster and being able to sit down and go, which they say is important for writing: sitting down and writing. There are other ways to improve yet, but this is a rewarding result.)
2) To keep fiction work primary, I had thought my go-to for blog posts would be to share some of the day’s work, à la Austin Kleon, who is a more visual artist, calling himself “a writer who draws,” and proposes (another 10 minutes gone already—didn’t get as many words on that one, so I guess this will be a 30-minutes exercise, at least. See what added thinking and performing some research does to your progress?!) share a little bit, a snapshot, of your work every day, to bring your audience along for the journey. And that is great, but with fiction it seems somewhat like sharing a story draft out of context and most possibly not always the best idea—giving a book away for free, and the worst part of it to boot. Ruining the story and the market. Honestly, I’m not that worried about giving a portion of my book away to my faithful readers: I appreciate them and would love for them to be interested along the way of its being written. It simply doesn’t seem like a great model for shaping and releasing a story. I’ll probably try to do some of that, as I have previously, but not consistently. So, to the point, Sarah and I discussed using blog posts as a warm-up for my fiction writing on a given day, and that’s where the timer comes in. Will I write for 10 minutes? Thirty minutes? About the story I’m working on, or about anything that holds my interest or that I’m interested in sharing? I don’t know yet, but it’s been 29 minutes and ticking, so that’s what that might look like …
What do you think?
B-b-BEEP!
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
P.S. It was 725 words in 30 minutes, in case you were wondering, and that’ll be more than I need on a routine day for billyhawes.com. The curse of the 200,000 words in a year is making word count a topic, as I’ve mention (too many times, I imagine), but this feels different: the blessing of already being to almost 180K and a handful of thousands ahead is that word count now feels like a tool that has been employed to accomplish something rather than a topic used to find words for counting.
Word Count: 179,767 / On Pace: 172,700 / Year’s Goal: 200,000
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