One of the most frustrating feelings in the world is to find yourself repeating past mistakes. My goal with this renewed venture into writing is to make brand NEW mistakes.
One of my biggest mistakes in the past has been setting nebulous goals. Case in point: “I want to write.” “To write” is a nebulous goal. And a nebulous goal is difficult to pursue. It’s even harder to accomplish. Do I write every day? Three days a week? Five? Do I measure by time—an hour a day? What if I’m stressed, and I spend 30 minutes just staring off into space? Well then, do I measure by word count? But what about those days where I just need to plan and outline?
Clearly, things can get complicated quickly.
As with any new pursuit though, the most important thing to do is to begin. My fiancée helped me come to that realization a few years ago. Preparing to begin exercising once again, I was trying to formulate the perfect exercise plan. After a few weeks, she asked me why I hadn’t started actually exercising yet. “Well, I have a routine for my chest, and my back, and my arms, and my shoulders. But I don’t have anything for my legs yet.” I explained to her that, once the plan was perfected, I would begin. This was the conversation that followed:
Her: “What are you doing right now?”
Me: “I told you, figuring out the plan.”
Her: “No, what exercise are you doing right now while you’re figuring out your plan?”
Me: “Nothing.”
Her: “So if you did anything, even just pushups, wouldn’t that be better than nothing?”
Me: “…”
I was so caught up with creating the perfect plan, that I wasn’t actually doing anything. And, a point that I brought up in my last post, and one that I keep finding myself coming back to—something is better than nothing.
So a year and a half ago, I took her words to heart when I began, once again, to write. My goal was to hit the ground running with the mental equivalent of pushups—15 minutes of writing each day. I even had a great tool to help me get started—a book called 642 Things to Write About, by the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Like the inspiration, the book had been a gift from my fiancée. As the name implies, it contains 642 different writing prompts. I wrote a story each day from one of the book’s prompts, sometimes spending more than 15 minutes on a story if I really got into it. I also created stories based off of my own ideas if I didn’t have the book with me or didn’t feel like working off of one of the prompts.
For a while, that worked pretty well. I managed to write for 62 consecutive days—my longest run to date—and I wrote a lot of stories that I’m proud of. But the fact remains that I stopped. And unlike other times where I’ve fallen off with things, in this case, I know what went wrong. Writing for 15 minutes each day was how I planned to start, eventually turning it into a warm-up for the rest of my writing for the day. But that never happened. The story was the bare minimum I set for myself each day; it was the only thing that I told myself was required. So it was the only writing I did.
Doing pushups every day is a great way to start exercising. But if you want to get in shape, you’re going to have to work up to more than just that. And while 15 minutes of writing each day is an excellent beginning, it gets less impressive as the weeks go on. I wasn’t building towards anything, and as a result, the daily stories became more and more of a chore. So I jumped into something longer. But that too was a nebulous goal. My task was not to finish the story, just to work on it. And so with no clear target to cling to, my work on that story petered out.
I’m at the same point now that I was when I was writing those daily stories. Right now, I’m primarily just writing this blog. I’ve worked on a few other things, but getting the week’s blog post up is my “bare minimum,” and it represents most of what I’ve done. A couple of weeks ago, I began to work on a story. But it’s something open-ended, something nebulous. It needs to be researched, it needs to be explored. Like the last long project I attempted, it is, at the moment, beyond me.
But that story wasn’t the only thing I’ve worked on. Tipped off by a writer in my building, I was browsing through NewPages.com, looking at writing contests. There was one that asked for a 300-word story. Simple enough, right? It was even short enough to obsess over and edit far too many times. I had a clear 300-word target, and a deadline to go with it. And wouldn’t you know it? I wrote and submitted my story. Huzzah!
It finally hit me: A deadline is the opposite of nebulous. And while some people are adept at setting their own deadlines and keeping to them, I need something a bit more external. So I went back to New Pages and found a few story competitions that cap the word count at 7,000. I’m going to set a target of 5,000 words for each story—more than I’ve written before in a piece of fiction—and see if I can’t hit a few deadlines. I can let go of the strict rules about time and word counts and find a process that works for me. It doesn't matter so much what my individual steps are, so long as they're taking me in the right direction.
I’m also going to retire the word “nebulous” for a good, long while.