In Today’s Journal
* Quote of the Day
* Yesterday’s Post
* On Using Challenges for Growth
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
Quote of the Day
“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose.” Dolly Parton
Yesterday’s Post
In case you missed it, the article I published in yesterday’s post is a must read for pretty much any fiction writer, but especially for those who are locked down or frozen by unreasoning fear.
For those reasons, I’ve added it permanently as a separate article to the Journal website.
You can read the article here.
Or you can download the article, free, in PDF by visiting this Gifts page and clicking on the link titled “In Writing, the Critical Mind….”
While you’re there, I recommend you click on some of the other links too.
On Using Challenges for Growth
Regardless of whether you ever participate in the TNDJ writing challenges, I hope all of you are setting writing challenges for yourself.
A personal writing challenge sets up a comparison within your own private little world of what you did yesterday with what you did today. That’s it. No pressure, no pain, no comparisons with anyone else.
Personal writing challenges are great for growth, especially if you use them to analyze your process and apply a solution to any problems you find.
But to enter into any challenge, it’s necessary to know two things: where your time’s going and what your writing process actually is.
Analyze Your Time
This can be a revealing exercise. It can reveal time periods during which you can carve out more time for your writing. It can also help you shift or reset your priorities as they pertain to time. It can even help with organizing your time.
To begin, list your waking hours down the left side of a sheet of paper in quarter-hour or half-hour or hour increments.
Then carry the paper with you through the day and write down whatever you’re doing during that time. Don’t show the paper to anyone else. This is a self-assessment strictly to reveal to you, privately, how you spend your time.
If your weekend routines are different than your weekday routines, do this for at least one weekday and either Saturday or Sunday.
Of course, life isn’t scripted. Doing this exercise over a period of a few days or a week will reveal even more time bubbles.
Analyze Your Writing Process
Once you know where your time’s going each day and have made any necessary adjustments, you can also analyze your writing process:
1. If you’re HAPPY with writing (for example) only 500 words per day—in other words, if it ‘works’ for you—that’s fine. Keep doing what you’re doing. (But check in with yourself to be sure your conscious critical mind isn’t horning in as a defense mechanism.)
2. If you AREN’T happy with writing only 500 words per day, take your analysis deeper to detect your problem. Ask yourself these questions:
A. How long do I actually write through the whole day?
- If your answer’s anything close to a half-hour per 500 words, you’re fine. Move on to B.
- If your answer’s closer to an hour or longer for 500 words, you probably need to stop focusing on individual words and sentences, trust your characters, and focus on letting the Story flow.
Do that successfully and you’ll find yourself wondering how you could ever write so fast. That alone will solve your words-per-hour problem.
Note: The quality of your writing will not suffer. It will improve.
B. How long COULD I spend writing through the whole day?
The answer’s different for everyone. This harkens back to your analysis of how you spend your time.
Again, if the answer’s anything close to a half-hour per 500 words, you’re fine. Either adjust your priorities or just put up with it.
But if your answer’s closer to an hour or longer, again see the second bullet point below A above.
Once you’ve determined how you spend your time and have solved the problem of focusing on Story instead of individual words and sentences, keep your writing time inviolable.
I strongly recommend setting personal fiction writing challenges for yourself. There is no better way to practice more and grow as a writer.
And one more thing: While you have goals to accomplish and other goals to set, enjoy the excitement of the process.
Trust me, all too soon there will come a time when you’ve accomplished so many personal goals it will be difficult to think up new challenges to conquer.
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Hidden Constraints in Your Writing Beginner advice from a beginning writer. The actual advice begins at “Writing tends to follow the same pattern….”
BookBub vs. Amazon vs. Facebook Ads: Authors Weigh In
The Numbers
The Journal………………….. 800
Mentorship Words…………….. 0
Total Nonfiction…………………. 800
Writing of
Day 1…… XXXX words. To date………… XXXXX
Fiction for January………………………… XXXX
Fiction for 2026…………………………… XXXX
Nonfiction for January.…………………… 12940
Nonfiction for 2026………………..……… 12940
2026 consumable words………………… 12940
2026 Novels to Date……………………… 0
2026 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2026 Short Stories to Date……………… 0
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 123
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 310
Short story collections……………………. 29