You’ve probably heard the advice before. “Write 1,000 words a day, every single day of your life, to get better at writing.” The reasoning is pretty straightforward. The more you work at something, the better you’ll become at doing it, and because most people need routines / goals to keep themselves motivated, if you set a manageable 1k per day word count, you’ll always and consistently get better.
This is fun advice. It’s useful advice, but I don’t think it is necessarily good advice. The immediate drawback is that if you’re like me, you’ll internalize the idea that if you miss a day, then the next day you need to write twice as much to “catch up”. And if you miss another day, then you’re even further below water. Suddenly, what should be fairly easy is this ominous mental workload that keeps piling up, and God forbid if you have a vacation with family, work event, or a funeral to attend.
Another problem with this thinking is that there’s no presumption of substance. It doesn’t matter what those 1,000 words are so much as that they exist, so if you really wanted to game the system, you could just go full Shining and type out how much of a dull boy you are, over and over again. No matter what, you’ll always be able to hit any arbitrary goal if you’re willing to sacrifice the concept of quality control while you’re doing it. That kind of undermines the value of the exercise from my experience, and only creates more problems down the road.
With all that said, I’ve found that this advice is useful insomuch as you don’t take it literally. The most important takeaway here is regular content creation. So long as you’re consistently working on something, you’ll always be improving your written acumen. The process of storytelling is multidimensional, and ranges from the straightforward nuts and bolts of writing a chapter, to the more meticulous steps of background research, thematic development, character identity, etc… The list is as deep as you want it. Honing in on any of those other avenues will in turn feed back into your ability to string words together into a cohesive story.
Think of it this way: you have that climactic dialogue scene right before your protag goes ham on the big bad, and you haven’t quite figured out how the two of them will shit-talk each other first. You know how you want to write the fight, but you still have that moment before that isn’t quite coming together. What do you do? Conventional wisdom says to brute force the dialogue first and edit the problems out later. I’d argue that instead of writing 1,000 words for the sake of having the scene written, spend that same amount of time and mental energy fleshing it out in advance. Set the tone and get their voices in your head, consider the different subjects that might come up, establish a firm start and finish to their conversation, and tie it back to whatever character development that has led to this point. Take some notes here and there if you’re worried that you’ll forget a cool zinger that pops into your head, but that’s not essential. The point is to add less stress into your day as opposed to more.
There. You’ve probably spent an hour brainstorming, did 1,000 words worth of work, and you didn’t have to worry about hitting some arbitrary goal. Once you actually write that scene, it will be much faster and less messy. That’s less time spent editing later, and more time freed to work on the next chapter.
When it comes to passion projects, we should never do anything that removes the passion from the project. If one attempt in development is adding more stress than taking away, try something different. Save the misery for when your writing has to turn into money.
