Tag: 10k goal

On the way to 10k

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I plan to achieve my writing goal of hitting 10k words of fiction in a single day. The steps I laid out to getting there were:

  1. Write first thing every day.
  2. Write in timed, focused sessions.
  3. Strive to achieve 2k words per hour.
  4. Strive to hit at least 6 writing sessions.
  5. Pre-write each day for the next day.

I’m happy to report that the writing has been coming along very well! Ever since I started timing my sessions and keeping track of how much and how fast I write, it’s been as if someone turned on a switch inside my brain. The words are flowing, the story is coming along very well, and I’m a lot happier and more productive than I was only a month ago.

The main thing that does it is, ironically, forcing myself to stop every half hour or so. When I wake up in the morning and thing of how much I want to write that day, it can be a little daunting. By writing in short bursts, it helps to break the big goal down into parts. When you think too much about all the writing you want to achieve, it’s very easy to get caught up in the procrastination trap. But when you think of it as just a half-hour session of 400-600 words, it seems a lot more doable. And it is!

So things are coming along very well with Gunslinger to the Stars. My goal is to finish the first draft by February 6th and send it out to my first readers shortly thereafter. If things keep going the way they have been, I may actually finish it sooner.

As for reaching 10k words, I’m still a ways off but headed in the right direction. For now, I’m laying the foundation for it: building good habits and hitting a consistent stride. Once I’ve got that laid out, I’ll start to stretch myself, pushing the limits further and further until I’m ready to make the final approach to the summit. No sense in pushing too hard and burning out along the way.

In other news, I’ve sent Captives in Obscurity (Sons of the Starfarers: Book V) off to my editor, and should be getting it back in early February. The cover art should be ready around the same time. If all goes well, the book should be up for pre-order by the end of February, with a release date of May 15th.

I’m not sure when Patriots in Retreat (Book VI) will come out, since I’m still writing it, but as of right now I’m tentatively planning for a release sometime in August. After I’ve finished with Gunslinger to the Stars, I’ll move on to Patriots and see if I can’t knock that out before the end of February. If so, I might actually push the release date up to July.

As for other WIPs I intend to tackle, The Sword Keeper and Edenfall are on the top of the list. The free month for Genesis Earth went a lot better than I had expected, leading me to believe that there’s enough potential to make finishing the trilogy worthwhile. Besides, Edenfall is already plotted out, so if I can keep up the 10k pace it should be a cinch to write. Same with The Sword Keeper.

That just about does it for this post. I intended to write another Self-Sufficient Writer post responding to some of the craziness going on in the world right now, but that will have to hold off until next week. I’ve also got another trope post planned for Monday, so that should be interesting.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this video about how many twinkies it would take to power the Death Star. Take care!

Resolution: 10k in 2016

Back in 2012, I set a resolution to write 10k words of fiction in a single day. I had read Rachel Aaron’s semi-famous blog post about it, and decided to give it a shot myself. The most I managed, however, was a handful of 5k writing days—impressive, but still far short.

In the years since, my writing pace has slowed down a lot more than I would like—not because of writing-related reasons, but because of things like procrastination, poor time management, and general disorganization. Well, it’s time for a change, and the new year seems like the best time to shake things up.

Rather than set a goal like “write every day” or “write X,XXX words per week,” I think this goal will do a lot more to put me in the right direction. It’s the difference between setting a goal to go to the moon vs. put something new in orbit every few months. When NASA set the moon as their primary goal, it not only provided them with the single-minded focus that they needed to get stuff done, but it led to a tremendous amount of scientific and engineering breakthroughs in the process. I’m hoping that something similar will happen with me.

So here’s the deal:

I can type at a maximum speed of about 100 WPM. Logistically, that means that the absolute minimum time needed to physically hit 10k words is 100 minutes, or 1:40 hours. That’s typing at top speed with no breaks, no mistakes, and no time to slow down and think.

I’ve measured my writing in the past, and found that my typical fiction writing speed is between 800 and 1,000 words per hour. To hit 10k words at that rate, I would have to work for an excruciating 10 to 12 hours a day—and that’s pure writing time. It doesn’t include things like breaks, water cooler chats, dinking around on social media, or any of the numerous other ways that regular employees waste time while on the clock.

Clearly, if I’m ever going to hit 10k words in a single day, I need to increase the speed at which I write. But how?

writingrate_by_starttimeWell, I know from my writing log experiment that the time of day doesn’t really affect my writing speed. That means I can start as early as I need to, and the earlier I can start the better. So that pretty much sets up the first step to achieving this 10k goal:

Step 1: Start off each day by writing as soon as possible.

writingrate_by_durationFrom the writing log, it looks like I tend to write fastest in short sprints that are less than one hour. That makes sense: the longer the writing session, the easier it is to get distracted and fall into the procrastination trap.

I have a hunch that the best way to increase my writing speed is to write in short, focused bursts. I’ve never actually tried to limit my writing time before, but it seems that I could really achieve a lot more focus by doing so. It will take some experimentation to figure out the optimal session length, but judging from the data it will probably be less than one hour.

Step 2: Increase speed by writing in short, focused sessions.

Obviously 10 to 12 hours of pure writing time is unreasonable. Even without a day job or other time obligations, burn-out would be a major issue. A much more reasonable amount of time to plan for would be 4-6 hours of pure writing time per day.

At 6 hours, to reach 10k words I would have to write at about 1.6k words per hour, which is reasonable. At 4 hours, I would have to write 2.5k words per hour, which is a lot tougher but still well below the 6k WPH physical limit, especially if I’m writing in short, focused bursts. From this, it’s not difficult to derive the next couple of steps.

Step 3: Increase average writing speed to 2,000 words per hour.

Step 4: Structure each day to achieve 6+ writing sessions.

The real trick to achieving this, as Rachel Aaron and numerous others have pointed out, is to take care of all the non-writing things that make the writing possible. This involves having an outline of some sort, or at least some idea of what is going to go on the page.

I’m a pantser, so I don’t write detailed outlines. However, I’ve found that it can help a lot to sketch out the next few scenes before I write them, and to browse tvtropes like a menu. In addition, long walks really help me to flesh out the story in my head. Without these pre-writing activities, the blank page can be really oppressive.

In more specific terms, I think it’s reasonable to allot 1-2 hours each day to pre-writing activities. Anything more than that would encroach on my actual writing time. Fortunately, I can usually hit two birds with one stone: for example, using my time on tvtropes to find material for blog posts, or outline the next few scenes in my head while hiking or exercising. But it’s important to make time for these things.

Step 5: Spend time each day in pre-writing activities for the next day.

These five steps seem like a good place to start. I’ll post them on my wall and revisit them in a month or so to see how they’re working out.

Ten thousand words in a single day is going to be tough, but if I can hit it at least once this year, I think it will remove a major block in my head and allow the words to really flow. It’s not just about writing faster, it’s about proving to myself that this is something I can do, and to use that as motivation to accomplish much more.

Best of luck with your own resolutions in 2016!