So I read the first chapter of the book “Everybody Writes” and the author mentions that, in order to become a better writer, you need to write 500 – 750 words a day, every day. That’s the only way to get sharp enough to put out decent work.
I’ve decided that that’s what I’m going to do. Starting today. I’m going to write every day for the next, let’s say 6 months, and track my progress as a writer. I’d like to start tomorrow with a writing prompt (I’ll pull something from r/writingprompts), and in 6 months I write the same story over again. Hopefully, it will be way better the second time. I won’t be revising any of the pages put out during this project. I know that you are supposed to consider everything a rough draft and revise endlessly. But for the sake of having clean writing samples to compare, the only revising I do will be live, while I’m writing the page. No revisiting a page the next day, once I’ve had a chance to sleep on it and see how bad it is.
During this time, I will actually finish reading Everybody Writes, instead of adding it to the list of many books that I’ve read two chapters and then put away. Ideally, I’d like to read another book or two in this span. Whenever I try to commit to a book reading goal, however, I always come up short. Maybe all this writing will get me in the book reading spirit. Maybe not. The most important thing here is to hold myself to a page a day. That’s the bread and butter; anything else is just some nice cinnamon on that butter. I can see why they say to do the writing first thing in the morning, as I already feel it’s flowing a little better than the first paragraph. Starting off your day with a good writing session probably gets your brain in gear nicely. I guess I’ll find out.
For each day, I’ll mix up the style or the entry. I’ll select writing prompts to write on. Some of the posts will be in a blog post style (maybe even a nice Listicle here and there. Sup Buzzfeed). And others might just be a stream of consciousness. Like a journal entry for the day. I’ll try and think up some structure for what posts are happening when. The most important thing I’ll need to figure out is accountability to make sure that at a minimum, 500 words are getting churned out each and every day. If you are reading this then I’ve decided to publish the project. Thanks for checking it out, and if you’d like to join me on the project, I’ll post the topic or prompt I’m writing on and when I’m writing that day. I’ll do this on Twitter because that seems easy.
That’s it. Consider this the introduction to the project. El proyecto in Spanish, I think. That was me just trying to hit the first word count because this is actually pretty hard. Anyway, see you tomorrow for the first prompt. Unless nobody is reading this, then see you tomorrow…Me.
Word Count: 530
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