I recently wrote an article about struggling to finish my second novel.
My problems in that case–my writer’s block, if you will–were related to editing and revising.
But what about writing? What do you do when you’re writing struggle is that you’re literally having trouble getting the words on paper and finish a story story?
Well, I think I have a solution to this. And it’s not like it’s some original idea that every writer in history hasn’t preached over and over since the history of writing. Here it is: Write a little bit every day until your story gets done.
And that’s it. Just freakin’ write. Stop over-analyzing. Stop over-plotting. Stop rewriting the same sentence over and over. Just pick a number and write until you get that many words written.
Pick a small, attainable number.
Don’t pick a word-count goal that you struggle to reach. Seriously, pick a tiny number. I like 250. That’s nothing. In fact, that’s just about the equivalent of this post up until this point.
If you stay focused, you should be able to hit this quickly. Like in fifteen minutes, but even if it takes an hour, it’s a goal that you should be able to reach every day.
Think about that. This tiny goal takes hardly any time to complete, and quite frankly, if you’re on a roll after shitting out 250 words, you’ll keep going. At bare minimum, you’re writing 1750 words in a week. Let’s round that up to 2000, which could easily be a half-way decent short story.
So if you’re stuck on other stuff and want to try pushing out some new material, try this. The month is young; start tonight. You should be able to finish a decent-sized short story and hopefully put a big dent in one more after that.
Give it a try and let us know how you did at the end of the month.
And until then, thanks for reading and have a great week.
