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Digestible

Dr. Jerry

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Does anyone else feel that it's easier to tell yourself "I'm going to write 500 words twice today" instead of "I'm going to write 1000 words today"?

I know it's a simple mental strategy, breaking things into smaller more digestible pieces, but for me it seems to work. I learned this from running on a treadmill. If I was going for a forty minute run and checked the clock to see that only ten minutes had passed and I was already tired the remaining thirty minutes would seem incredibly daunting. Instead what I would do is break the run into segments. I'd listen to some songs for a set fifteen minutes, then watch a TV show for a set fifteen minutes, etc. When I would check the time my brain, even though I knew I was doing a forty minute run, still looked at the end of each segment like a finish point and this motivated me to keep going.

Sometimes writing flows and before you know it you've written a ton but when it becomes hard and feels more like work I've found this to be an effective strategy.
 

Kat M

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I do this when I'm brainstorming. Rather than stare at a page and internally tear myself to pieces because I can't think of a solution to the problem I've set up, I do that for a set amount of time—10, 15 minutes, 3 songs on Spotify, until my tea is done, etc.—then do something else. When I was a kid I called it "striping activities." (Yup, I used the word activities. I didn't get out much) I find during the other activities my brain gets going again. Well, most of the time.
 

EvilPenguin

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I have not done this, but I definitely want to give this a try. I used to be able to write 1,000+ words per day, but I feel like the better I get at writing, the less words I can actually get down in a day. Most days, I'm lucky if I reach 500 words. I'm wondering if writing multiple times per day will help me increase that.
 

Thorberta

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I definitely like cutting my writing up into digestible pieces. Let's say my goal for the day is 1000 words (I'm okay with that for an overall goal) I'll take a piece of paper and write 1-10 on it for each hundred words. I'll write in bursts (depending how I'm feeling I'll set a small goal like 'write at least 100 words' or 'write for 5 min straight') and as I go cross out the number so I can see my progress and even if I don't make the whole goal I have tangible proof that I did make progress.
 

maggiee19

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Usually, my goal is 4,000 words a day. (I can write more than that, up to 10,000, if I really want to) but I don't do those 4,000 words in one sitting.
 

L.C. Blackwell

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Wait, what? 4k words per day!! How long? Of what quality? I've never heard of anyone having that kind of production before!

4000 wpd runs to about seven densely paragraphed, single-spaced pages at 12 pt. Times New Roman with 1.25 inch margins. It's far from being a totally impossible output for some writers. But, each person's individual working pace is so unique that I suggest you don't use it as a measure of what you "should" be doing.

I don't use wordcounts myself, because I find it's a false target. It won't make me more or less happy with a scene, and it doesn't help to count something I may not keep in the manuscript anyway. I prefer to gain something substantial in a day's work: a piece of dialogue that developed well; a scene that picked up some emotional impact; or a character blossoming in unexpected ways. If I complete a whole scene and one or more of those things happened, I feel good about it. If I finish a chapter, and it has a "good" feeling on re-reading, then that's satisfying too.
 
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