A Page a Day
I had the privelege of meeting Linda Sue Park two years ago; between talking about babies, her new book, and how her children wheedled her into competing on Jeopardy, she imparted some of the best writing advice I've ever received: set yourself small goals and meet them.
She heard Katherine Paterson say that she writes two pages a day for all of her novels and decided to adopt the practice. (You can read more about it on her website.) Does it work? Well, they both have Newbery Medals. I'm not gonna argue with that.I adapted this practice to meet my family's needs and set the goal of one page a day, but the principle holds. Most days I manage to write at least one page, sometimes two, (very) occasionally ten... but unfortunately I have a bad tendency to allow discouragement, unfolded laundry, and organizing of random files on my computer to get in the way about once a week. So, to discipline myself, I'm taking part in Swimmer's Page-a-day challenge which starts tomorrow. I'll keep you posted on how it goes!
Good luck!
ReplyDeleteLinda Sue Park and Katherine Paterson are two of my favorite writers. I read one time that another of my favorites, Elizabeth George Speare (Witch of Blackbird Pond), also only wrote one or two pages a day.
Congrats on setting a concrete but manageable goal for yourself. That's admirable.
ReplyDeleteI also love it that you can admit to obsessing about the location of files. For me it used to be icons. For some reason borrowing other people's artwork and applying it to my desktop made me feel creative. I used to kill days that way.
Good luck! I also have that tendency. In my case I like to visit many websites and kill all the time I have before I go to bed instead of writing. I hope this challenge will help.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I'm keeping my fingers crossed. ;)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you are on board I hope you do well!
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