Writer's Epiphany

If I write a comfortable set number of words per day it accumulates far faster than if I try to push myself to write more. Usually, even if I wrote, I would feel guilty for not writing more. But I am not a particularly fast writer, and feelings of guilt tend to make me avoid work rather than motivating it. The other problem was I love writing, but it was beginnig to feel a lot like work. This was doing more than simply frustrating me. Writing is as important to my mental health as breathing is to my physical health. But with all the work my senior year, I didn't have the time to write as much as my conscience demanded I should. I practically gave up entirely and my psyche has been suffering for it. However, I was inspired by my favorite author Terry Pratchett. I read in the author's note of Good Omens that he always wrote 500 words per day, without fail. Now this may just mean "at least" 500 words or exactly 500. I'm not sure and he could write more than that now. He's quite prolific. But seeing as this was half of what I normally considered a respectable amount, I was shocked. Still, I figured if it was a good enough number for Terry Pratchett, then it was good enough for me. I didn't start doing this right away because I was still in school and still going quietly insane. But once summer started (and after a few weeks of absolutely no mental activity to recover from my burn out) I started writing regularly and it's been working wonderfully so far. I've only been doing it for about a week, but I find it gives me a much more positive attitude to set a goal I know I can reach and not feel guilty the rest of the day. I've also been taking it to mean "at least" 500 words, because I'm not the type of writer that can stop mid-sentence, and I find it tiresome to keep too close track. But 500 is amazingly a good average of about when I start running out of steam. Even if I can keep going it's good to stop rather than to just keep writing until I'm exhausted or blocked. It gives me something to look forward to when I start writing again.

As a note, Bethany has the honor of being my friend of the week! Thanks for reading Bethany!

Mom is, once again, Mom of the week.