Kinetic Writer

I haven’t been writing in the past few weeks. Not blogging, not editing existing stories for publication prospecting or working on works in progress. I’ve been reading a fair amount, but I’ve frankly been lazy about forcing myself to sit down and write. Excuses come more easily than I’d like.

I’m still very afraid of failure.

NaNoWriMo is right around the corner, which brings a lot of past failure to my mind. I’ve attempted to write a 50,000 word novel in four of the past five Novembers. I have to make a decision soon as to whether or not I will attempt that again.

I’ve read or heard the suggestion that if one can schedule an hour a day to write–anything–then writing will come more easily. One hour will turn into two or three if you get on a roll. I experienced that when I was blogging every day on my innergeek blog. But the reality is that I’m not going to blog every day of my life because I don’t always have something I want to share with the Internet.

So I’m setting a new goal: To write for one hour a day, five days a week. That’s a very reasonable goal. I will count blogging, writing new story content, editing existing story content, and writing freelance nonfiction proposals in this goal. My “week” will be Sunday to Saturday, and I will report my progress on this blog on Sunday or Monday of the following week.

Five hours a week. I can do that.

What writing goals do you have? What’s worked for you in the past?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 12:38 pm and is filed under anxiety, goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.