Challenge,  On Writing

Once Again the Power of a Streak

October 26, 2019 /

Without This Blog Streak I Never Would Have Turned on This Computer…

But with this many years of never missing a day, even with doing a lot of other fun stuff today, I turned on the computer to type something here. Did it matter what I type? Nope.

To hit the blog streak, the daily blog streak, it just had to be something. You know, I am alive, the streak is alive, and so on and so on.

Imagine if you were doing this kind of streak with your writing, that no matter how late, how much your mind was elsewhere, you wrote 250 words a day on a streak.

Imagine that. Go ahead. I dare you.

250 words doesn’t seem to be much, does it? Yet it would get you one 90-plus thousand word novel a year or two 45 thousand word novels in a year.

That’s right, just 250 words a day.

A simple streak. Now I have been doing this blogging streak now for a lot of years. Say you were writing 45 thousand words book and kept the streak alive for 6 years. That’s twelve novels. A could six-book series or four trilogies.

Or about 22 four-thousand word short stories a year. Or in six years 132 short stories.

And everyone would call you prolific. And wonder where you find all the time to write and get all that done.

Time how long it takes you to do 250 words.

This blog is 250 words exactly and it took 14 minutes exactly.

That’s how simple this is.

8 Comments

  • Ashley R Pollard

    October 26, 2019 at 3:26 am

    I’ve been working on getting my writing streak going. Set it at 200 words per day back some time ago. Now hitting 500 words a day, and yesterday just shy of a 1000.

    So not only does a building a streak encourage writing, it also builds up forward momentum.

  • DS Butler

    October 26, 2019 at 5:48 am

    How’s the fiction writing going, Dean? Have you managed to establish a new routine now you’re in Vegas?

  • Lloyd MacRae

    October 26, 2019 at 11:52 am

    Yes, yes, yes. The Power of a Streak. Without your example and push I would never have started my own streak as I mentioned before. Today is day 1,743 of writing something every day. (5 full years on Dec 17th). It develops a habit and keeps me going. I don’t bother mentioning it anymore on some of the boards I visit because I’ve had people sending me messages that I’m going to hurt myself (my mental problems aren’t from writing LOL) or they can’t all be quality words (I’m looking for a dictionary that indicates which words are quality ones). And I’ve had a bunch of books piling up because I fall down on Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market. ..but I blame Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else. LOL

    Thank you Dean (big thumbs up)

  • J.A. Marlow

    October 26, 2019 at 10:14 pm

    Having done word wars before I know 250 words takes me less than 15 minutes. Faster if I’m on a roll. Thing is, I rarely stop at 250, except when I’m having a huge fatigue flare. Once the words start, they want to keep flowing.

  • Amy Laurens

    October 28, 2019 at 1:38 am

    🙂

    I actually did this last week. One day I only wrote 25 words – but I wrote for 3 minutes because that’s what I had on that day. Wasn’t much then, but motivated me not to miss another couple of days, and those got me between 200 and 800 words that I wouldn’t have been motivated to get if I hadn’t done the 3 min/25 words earlier in the week. Great philosophy. Love it.

  • Henry Vogel

    October 30, 2019 at 10:02 am

    This is exactly how I got started. Starting in May 2012, I aimed for 250 words, three times per week. That’s what my schedule allowed, so I went with it. My first short novel (43,000 words) came out two years later. My 13th novel (a good bit longer, at 78,000 words) comes out Friday, and I have three shorter novels in various editing stages.

    Take Dean’s advice to heart, folks. It works. You just have to set a schedule and stick to it.