1000 Words… and books for writers

In search of something to motivate me to get back to writing regularly, I stumble upon a book that gives me a goal.

I’ll share a secret with you: I have always wanted to be a writer. I started writing when I was about 13 and filled many spiral bound notebooks with my neat printing in ink, building characters and telling stories. Writing was in my blood, something I just felt I had to do.

In my junior year of college, when I somehow found myself as an accounting major, I called my mother and told her I wanted to change my major to journalism. She had a hairy fit and told me I’d never make a living as a writer.

I stuck with accounting and spent the first eight years out of college as an auditor and financial analyst. I was good at my job but miserable. I dreaded going to work every day.

Then I left my very secure job at the corporate headquarters of a Fortune 100 company and became a freelance writer. My mother had another hairy fit but this time I was smart enough to ignore her. And then I proved her wrong.

My writing career revolved around computer how-to books. Back in the early 1990s until about 2010, these books were in high demand and I churned them out, learning pretty quickly that the only way to make a living doing it was to have a bestseller or write a lot of books. So I wrote a lot of books until I had a bestseller. And another bestseller. And I kept writing. By the time people pretty much stopped buying computer how-to books, I’d written more than 80 of them, had gotten training as a helicopter pilot, bought a helicopter, and was ready for my next career.

But that doesn’t mean I stopped writing. I wrote in this blog. I wrote articles about flying and later about boating. For a long while, I worked on fiction — novels for myself; I never intended to try to get them published.

Then I had a disruption in my life that made it difficult for me to write. It was as if a spark had been extinguished and I couldn’t get it relit. Sure, I could still spit out blog posts and the occasional article. But my fiction mojo was gone. And it still is.

Motivation

Every once in a while, I read a book that motivates me to get back to writing, that reminds me the spark once existed and the skills are still there. It’s just a matter of getting back to it, to dedicating the time to a project, to staying focused enough to produce something worth reading.

On Writing

The first book I read that made me feel like that was On Writing by Stephen King. I mentioned this book at least one other place in this blog, in a post from 2009 called “Writing Tips: Soaking Up Creative Energy.” In that post, referring to King’s book, I wrote:

Did you ever go someplace or do something or read something or see something that made you feel almost feverish about writing (or painting or doing something else creative)? It’s as if this place or thing gave you a poke with a creative juice taser. After (or during) the experience, you must create. You’re driven to create.

This was before my disruptive life event. But I remembered the way the book made me feel and I re-read it. Sadly, it didn’t hit me with the same force the second time around.

So I kept looking for other books to motivate me. I suspect I’ve already blogged about this once within the past five years, but I can’t find the post right now. I know I recently tooted about it on Mastodon.

I will mention here — to forestall suggestions — that I tried Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I didn’t like it the first time I read it. When pressed again and again by folks to read it, I tried again, thinking I’d missed something. I didn’t like it any better. I did not like the author or her voice or her self-pitying attitude. (At least that’s how it seemed to me both times.) I could not identify with her at all; we had nothing in common. I also didn’t like the introduction of religion and God into a book that was supposed to be about writing. So please don’t recommend it. It didn’t do anything for me except make me wonder why so many people were so in love with it.

The First Five Pages

I did read another book a long time ago that motivated me. I have a copy in my library to re-read. That one’s called The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman. I remember that after reading it, I was so enthusiastic about it that I contacted the author to thank him for it. That was probably not long after the book came out in 2000, long before my disruptive event. I’m hoping a re-read will bring some of that feeling back.

Let me mention two other books that I recently ordered and hope will motivate me. (With luck, my housesitter will have brought them in and left them on the countertop for me when I get home from my current trip.) The Writer’s Notebook I and The Writer’s Notebook II are two books full of writing essays from the writers of the highly regarded literary magazine Tin House. I’ll admit that I had never heard of these books (or the magazine) until I watched a YouTube video that explored topics covered in one of the essays.

1000 Words

1000 Words

The book that triggered this post — and a New Year’s resolution — is called 1000 Words, edited by Jami Attenberg. The book’s backstory is this: Jami and another writer friend (who happened to be a teacher) wanted to motivate themselves and each other to work on their various projects. They decided that they would each write 1000 words a day (minimum) for two weeks straight as a sort of “boot camp.” They felt that they could stick to it because they’d be cheering each other on. A buddy system. (I have found this extremely effective for a lot of goals.) They’d do it in the summer when the teacher was off from work. Jami has a social media presence and shared info about it on various social networks. The next thing she knew, it had a hashtag and hundreds or thousands of people were participating in the “1000 Words of Summer.”

Once the thing took off and she started getting feedback about it, she was also able to get short essays from writers to include in this book. So that’s basically what the book is: a bunch of very short essays by writers about writing.

Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as I hoped it might be. Some essays are good and very helpful to me. Others ring flat, like a self-help book written by a new age guru. It’s a library book, so I can’t annotate the pages to highlight the helpful passages I might want to return to. I’m getting through it slowly. The main problem is that I tend to read in bed and most books put me to sleep.

But it did do something for me: it triggered a New Year’s resolution to write at least 1000 words a day. That’s going to force me to sit down at a keyboard and write something, either for an existing project, such as my Great Loop book, or a new project, such as the mystery novel I began years ago and lost in a hard disk crash. (That was a different disruptive event in my life. Back up your files, folks!) Or even a blog post.

NaNoWriMo vs 1000 Words of Summer

If you follow writer’s forums and the like, you probably know about the recently disgraced NaNoWriMo. This is an annual event held in November, National Novel Writing Month. It’s been around for at least 20 years and apparently some participants have had some measure of success with it. The goal is to knock out a complete novel of at least 50,000 words in one month.

Too Many Words?

There’s a scene in the movie Amadeus when Mozart is told that one of his works has “too many notes.” As a writer, that always hit me hard. I believe that a creator will make something just as long or as short as it needs to be. I’d rather read a short novel that moves along without a lot of repetition than a longer one that seems obviously padded to meet word count requirements. Every word should count.

Yes, that’s more than 1,000 words a day. The average adult novel is 50,000 to 100,000 words, depending on what resource you look at. Even if you shoot for the low end, that’s still more than 1,600 words a day.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to force you to complete a book project in a month. If you’re the kind of person who always seems to have a reason to not work on a project — like me these days — the camaraderie of the NaNoWriMo crowd might be just what you need.

But I think 1,000 words a day is just as good a goal, provided that you keep it up until you’re finished.

(November is a dumb month to write a novel anyway. Who can find time with the holidays coming up? Why couldn’t it be January or February?)

My New Year’s Resolution

Like most folks, I have more than one New Year’s resolution. The one that matters here is the goal of writing 1,000 words a day. I think I can do it at least 5 days out of 7 for the whole year.

What do you think?

(I’ll be honest with you: I wrote this post on January 1 right after writing another post. I’m up to 3300 words so far today and I have yet one more topic I want to explore for tomorrow.)

And yes, I’ll ask this question: What writing book have you read that fired you up about writing and made you want to get right to it?



Journaling My Year

I start, on January 1, to keep a daily journal and 10 1/2 months later, I’m still at it.

Over the years, I have tried and mostly failed to keep a daily journal of the things going on in my life. I’d start with good intentions and then stop, mostly because I forgot to keep writing. Then I’d start up again, swearing I’d keep at it, but then stop.

What I Tried

I tried handwritten journals in beautiful blank books. Stopping midway through one of them was especially painful since I really wanted to fill them and have a record of a long, uninterrupted period in a really nice looking book.

I tried using calendar-style planners with a whole week on each spread. Not much space to write there; I could simply put down a few bullet points about my day. These suffered the same fate. I have many partially completed calendar books floating around my home.

I tried marble notebooks like the ones we used in elementary school. The local Fred Meyer sells them for just 50¢ each once the Back to School buying rush is over. I have a lot of them. (I have a paper addiction.) They fared no better than all the other handwritten options.

And yes, I tried digital journalling. I tried apps designed just for that purpose. (I was very excited about Apple’s Journal app until I actually tried it; what good is a digital journal if you can’t export or print it? How many people will be using the same Journal app in 20 years? Definitely not me.)

Scrivener Document Sidebar
As you can see in the sidebar for my Scrivener Journal document, I was very bad about writing journal entries.

I also tried using Scrivener, the darling of the writing world. I created a Journal file with folders for months and files for days. The screenshot of the document’s sidebar shown here should give you an idea of how that went.

Understand that my desire to journal every day has been very intense throughout my life. Heck, this blog was started as a journal of sorts. Not a daily journal but just a journal of the interesting things I was doing or thinking that I wanted to share.

That desire ramped up as I aged and I started forgetting about things I’d seen or done. The only remnant — or trigger, in some cases — of a memory was a photo I took at the time. But I don’t take photos of everything. I worried that I was permanently forgetting the things I did, things I might want to remember in the future.

Things that would be so simple to just jot down right after they happened.

In a journal.

Another Try

This came to a head when I was trying to write up the days of my Great Loop trip in the My Great Loop Adventure blog I created to document the entire trip. It isn’t easy to blog in detail every day so I slacked off. And then, when I was trying to fill in the gaps in the blog, I realized that I just couldn’t remember the details I wanted to share.

I needed to do something about this. My memory was starting to get iffy and I didn’t want to lose days of my life. I had to try journaling again and stick to it this time.

The Journal I bought
I bought a yellow one in the largest size; they come in a lot of colors and three sizes.

I started on January 1. I prepared by buying a very nice journal book on Amazon (don’t judge me) that had 365 pages. One page per day. They were not dated or numbered but they did have spaces for both bits of info. And lines close enough together to fit a few hundred words.

I started on January 1 in Key West FL, where I was on my boat with my friend Jason. And, for the first time ever, I’ve kept to it, providing an entry for every single day of my life. It’s now October 16 and I have entries right through yesterday.

Covid Entry
I backtracked to fill in the pages for days I was really suffering with Covid. All I remember from those days was sleeping.

I’ll be honest: I don’t always write every evening or the following morning like I want to. Sometimes I miss a few days and have to go back. I’ve found that going backwards from the current day usually helps. The only days when the entry is unreasonably short were the few days that I slept nearly the entire day due to my bout with Covid in August.

Why It’s Working this Time

Why am I finally doing so well at journaling this year? I think there are three reasons, one of which I already touched upon.

  • Motivation. I’m tired of forgetting days and weeks of my life. I’m tired of looking at photos I shot 3 years ago and seeing places I forgot I’d visited. I don’t think my memory is any worse than the average person my age — it’s not like it’s a problem — but the only way I see being able to remember stuff is to jot notes about the day at day’s end or the following morning.
  • Success leads to more success. After ten and a half months of keeping this up, I feel that I’d really be letting myself down if I didn’t continue to do it. So the more I write, the more I want to write.
  • 365 single pages to fill. The book’s design makes it easy — and, in a way, required — to journal every day. There are exactly the right number of pages to fill. (Actually, there were 366 days this leap year, but I can always insert an extra sheet if I have to.) Second, the pages aren’t that big. There are only 25 lines! That’s nothing for someone like me. And who says I have to use every single one?

I bring the journal with me whenever I know I’ll be away for more than just one night. I try to write my entries at the end of the day, but if I miss that, I’ll try to do it in the morning when I’m having my coffee in bed.

What I’ve got so far is a summary of what I’ve been up to so far this year. Sometimes I write about when I woke up, how I slept, and what I ate. Sometimes I write details about a travel day’s experiences. Sometimes I write notes to myself about how I have to do something or change a dumb behavior. And once in a while, I write what’s on my mind socially, politically, or romantically.

And yes, I can squeeze a lot into 25 lines when I need to. I don’t write full sentences. It’s not like it’s going to be published anywhere. It’s just something I can look back on in years to come to remember what those pictures I might have are all about. Or to fill in the gaps when I didn’t take pictures.

One thing is for sure: it’s definitely going to come in handy when I fill in the gaps in the My Great Loop Adventure blog.

Pronoun Woes

This old reader/writer knows the difference between singular and plural pronouns.

I just finished an audio book that kind of bugged me. The problem: the use of plural pronouns to apply to a singular person.

It was jarring. Most of the characters had the usual singular pronouns of he/him/his or she/her/hers so the text I heard as I listened was extremely easy to follow when the reader read about those characters. But one main character used the they/them/their pronouns. As a result, anytime the reader referred to that person, it sounded as if he were talking about multiple people. My listening brain came to a complete halt every time.

I’m old school. Although I understand the reason why people don’t want to use a male or female pronoun, I really wish we’d come up with a pronoun that didn’t already exist as a plural.

It’s difficult to understand text that refers to one person with a plural pronoun when the text could easily refer to multiple people. Many times that the reader referred to this character, I had to figure out if it was just that one person or multiple people. It was extremely distracting from the story.

I want to blame the writer, but I know why he did it. He wants to help make gender neutrality more acceptable to the general public. He wants us to get used to it. It’s a noble goal. But it drives some of us nuts. I would definitely have enjoyed the book more — with a lot less distraction — if he stuck to standard pronoun usage for his characters. Hell, he already had two lesbian couples in the book. How much did he need to support gender issues in what was basically a science fiction drama?

And now I know folks are going to step forward here and comment that we’ve been using “they” to refer to singular unspecified gender individuals for years and that it’s in the dictionary or that it’s in some widely used style guide. But it’s only been in common usage for people who don’t want a specific gender identity for a short while now. And I’ve been reading and writing for more than 50 years. It’s not as if I can flip a switch in my brain and it all works out fine for me. “They” refers to more than one person in my brain and most of the brains out there.

Clearly, we need a new set of singular pronouns. Can we fix this please?