Why am I doing the
Jeff Goins 500 words per day writing challenge?
Simple. I need to
re-establish the writing habit for starters. After all, I've had the
writing bug since I was 14 years old and had discovered fanfiction. I
had already been writing to pen-pals for four years by then,
encouraged by my family so I would learn how to write. (I think
handwriting was the key factor.) I've been through periods where I
hardly wrote at all, and I discovered that made for a very unhappy
Kendra.
What I really want
now is to get my writing career off the ground. I want to see the
stories I've been working on become polished and publishable. I want
to see those make me a living at writing.
But most of all, I
think I'm doing this because I'm frustrated with parts of my life.
500 words a day is
nothing to someone who's done NaNoWriMo every year since 2010, and
won each year since 2011. My daily average during NaNo or Camp NaNo
is at least three times this challenge. Some days I've managed over
10,000 words. (Yes, I had the day off those days. But I often still
managed at least par even on days where I worked double shifts.)
Yet it is a good
goal for someone who is considering also making money from
copywriting. I want to establish such a strong pattern in my core
that I'm beating any goal set before me.
What's stopping me
in my tracks is the not knowing where to start with the training.
I've signed up for several writing and self-publishing courses. Yet
I've allowed life to overwhelm me and delay my start.
I feel like it'd be
a gutsy move to make my theme for this month exploring the emotions
and thoughts that are holding me back. I moved to another state to
start a career as a coach and teacher, and it's taking longer to
estabish success than I had expected. Enough that I needed to take a
second job that's now drumming up the majority of my income. I had
expected to be out of that particular industry, which makes me even
more frustrated.
Could this
frustration really be fear? Or is it that I've lost so much touch
with my instincts that I've stopped trusting in the things that
motivated me to succeed before? I went through an on-line masters
program, so meeting deadlines isn't the issue.
Or so I believe.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe the issue is
more about enforcing my own promises to myself, holding them sacred
and worth honoring. That's something I feel I've had trouble with
lately, and my goal is to work on that with this course. I somehow
missed the prompt for Day 1, and so I also spent time writing over
800 words of fiction as a prompt for someone I owed a story to. (A
secret Santa thing.)
And even that ran
into trouble. I kept stalling and pausing. Partly because I wasn't
entirely sure where the story was going. I knew the prompt, but
getting it to a natural conclusion wasn't coming easily. I don't
think the problem was that I was also listening to friends (I was
writing at a write-in established by members of the local NaNoWriMo
group) I hadn't seen in two weeks. I think it was the lack of
thinking about the arc.
That's sometimes
been a theme with me. If I don't plan ahead things don't go well. I
seem to work best with a plan to guide me, and then sometime winging
the details. At least where my NaNo projects are concerned. With
other things I have to plan more of the details so I know what to do
and when to do it. That makes my jobs run smoother.
I also have to
recognize when do I work at my best, which leads me to the Day 3
prompt from the challenge (which technically hasn't started for me as
I'm still on March 2 as of the moments I'm writing this). It
suggested getting up 60-90 minutes early each day.
This one I balk at.
Why? Because one of my priorities for my well-being is sleep, and
that means getting enough each night. I had to arrange to give up one
of the classes I taught because I was losing so much sleep getting up
to teach it that it had to be why I got sick each term. My immediate
family are all night owls. We naturally don't fall to sleep early and
therefore need to sleep in later than most.
Now, I've heard some
claim that early birds are more productive. I feel that those who
know their own rhythms and how to work with them do the best, whether
they're early birds or night owls. I've had times of great writing
productivity staying up late, or answering the call from my muse when
I couldn't sleep.
For me the key is
planning ahead and figuring out what needs doing sooner rather than
later. I even bought two different planners to help me with this.
But tools are no
good if you don't use them.You could have a fabulous system, but if
you don't pick it up daily and work with it how will it work for you?
When I used the Franklin Covey planners regularly they worked great.
I'm trying the
Productivity Planner and the Passion Planner. The former is for
establishing a record of the most important things to do for five
days each week. It makes sense to focus on the work week of most of
the work since I've tended to have very full weekends – usually
with work. It lets me see things move from the To-Do list to the Done
list, which is very satisfying to see grow. The latter is meant for
longer-term plans. Say a few months out to maybe preparing for a
year-long plan. And it's flexible in how I could use it.
We shall see how
they work for me. For now the goal is to establish new habits.
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