Thursday, February 9, 2012
100 / 500 /1,000
If I write an produce 100 new words on a document, that just means I showed up for work and did something. If I produce 500 words, that means I showed up and stayed around for at least an hour or so. There has to something valuable in those words, some new idea, or the articulation or fleshing out of an idea or two. If I produce 1,000 words or more then I really kicked it into high gear. That usually means 2 1/2 hours or 3. I might have copied and pasted some quotes from other sources, or written parts of several chapters. Today, since I only wrote a bit before and after classes, was a 500 day. I will have the Mirth writing group tomorrow, where we sit around a table and write while not talking to one another. That is always good for 750 or 900. I've almost done two weeks of a chain of continuous writing. If I can get through the weekend, then I can probably continue that for the following two weeks at least, through almost the beginning of March.
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1 comment:
Good!!!! :-)
Here are my latest realizations on all of this (I'm underdeveloped, so there are some realizations I know one is supposed to have at a gut level much earlier in life, but they come to you when they do, I suppose).
In the past I always wrote things either because I had a point I wanted to make or because I needed a written product for some purpose, or both.
Just needing a written product was never enough - I had to have a point I wanted made and that I didn't think was being made.
[Now I have put up one of four blinds, not well.]
More recently I've been seeing points close enough to my points being made by others and thinking well, the job's being done, am I not just beating a couple of points needlessly into the ground?
But the new insight is - despite importance of not reinventing wheel, the personal point is, one works on one's project so as to advance one's own intellectual development, in pretty much exactly the same way as preparing for exams causes the students to advance.
And so that is the actual point of writing every day -- it's also the way to Get It Done, of course, but the deeper point of it is to cultivate one's garden.
[OK, back to the blinds - ugh.]
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