From Medium:
Anyone who has followed me for any length of time knows that I’m all about teeny, tiny goals. You can write an entire novel every year if you really write for ten solid minutes a day.
But what if ten minutes is too much?
If you’re ill. If you’re overwhelmed with non-writing work. If you have a bunch of kids and a mountain of laundry and volunteer work and a job.
If you have all those things, asking you to give your art ten minutes can feel like asking you to give your art ten hours. Impossible. Just more than you can handle.
And when you feel that stuck, it can be super easy to just skip the whole thing.
Only skipping it doesn’t feel good. Because writing is your sanctuary. It’s the one thing you do for yourself, maybe. It’s your dream.
. . . .
Your teeny, tiny goal should be your actual, real, goal. You get full credit when you reach it and it’s 100 percent fine if you have days or weeks or months where you never go beyond it.
If you set a timer and write without stopping for ten minutes, you should be able to write at least a page. Maybe two.
If you can write 250 words in ten minutes (one double-spaced page), you’ll write 91,250 words in a year.
That’s a novel. A real, honest-to-God, novel.
Link to the rest at Medium
I will say that for me at least, a hour once a week is far more useful that 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes is barely long enough to get the word processor open and write a sentence or two. When I do an hour, the first part will be done in fits and starts, but things will pick up as I get into the flow of the story, and by the end, the last part of it will just roll off my fingers.
I can’t write 250 words in ten minutes like she says — much less 500 words — so I focus on what she says later in the piece:
– Just write your story.
I focus on filling a page, that’s 250 words, with no time limit. As long as that page is filled in a day, telling more about the story, that is the goal, and that is enough.
Like she says, a page a day is about 91k in a year. If I can double that in a day, that is two books a year. If I can do three pages a day, that’s three books a year, and so on, but focusing on those extra pages are just so much Blue Sky if I look at that the wrong way and I fall into “quotas” thinking.
Quotas are death to my writing, so I simply keep a running count of my daily pages just to see how many pages I wrote in a year vs the books I’ve published that year.
So far, there is no obvious correlation, and that fact is encouraging to me when the page count seems to be getting nowhere on the latest WIP. Correlation is not causation. HA!
This may sound mean, but if you’re too overwhelmed to write for just a few minutes every day, then you’re too overwhelmed to be a writer. It’s about priorities.
Yes, we all sometimes fall. I’ve slipped off the bandwagon a few times. But when that happens, we have to be satisfied with acknowledging that we’re not prioritizing writing at that moment…and that should be okay.