So I made this commitment to writing 200 words per day… As I started writing, it was really easy. But as time has gone on, the writing has become more challenging. Maybe it’s because I think too much about it. Or maybe I’m too confident in it now. Maybe it’s like my golf game…. It becomes the best in the middle of the season, and by the end it’s worse off compared to the beginning of the season… like it wasn’t even worth trying to get better… maybe therein lies the issue. Life golf, I’m perhaps too focused on becoming a better writer that it has begun to take away from the joy of writing for the sake of putting words and thoughts on a page.
200 words a day. I don’t know where I got that idea from… probably a meme about writing. But it sounded good. Sounded manageable…. And also hard to make an excuse for not having completed. I decided to commit myself to 200 words a day yesterday… and then I proceeded to not write yesterday. Oh the irony. So now I need to write 400 words today to make sure I stay on pace with 1400 words per week.
Well would you look at that, the end of the past paragraph got me to 204 words. Nice. That wasn’t so bad. Damn idiot couldn’t have done that yesterday… took all of less than 5 minutes. I spent far more than 5 minutes yesterday thinking about how I should be writing.
Anyways, 200 words a day.
200 words a day
1400 words per week
72,800 words per year
According to a google search for “average number of words per page in a book”, I discovered the following:
“Most adult books are about 90,000 words, and no longer than 100,000 words (unless you’re JK Rowling). Teen books are about 55,000 words. How many words are there to a page? It depends on the font you are using, of course, but in general, 250-300 words per page.”
Well that right there puts the amount of effort needed to write a book (Perhaps just from a words standpoint) into attainable perspective for me. Even on the busiest of days, I’ve always had 5 minutes to spare… so I guess I just proved to myself I could easily write a book from a word count standpoint… even if the content was garbage… I could write a book in the next year. So that’s a mental barrier broken. Cool.
Writing a book… that’s been a long time goal of mine. I remember my freshman year of college, I got really into writing. I also began journaling all of my writing into a little bound leather book. A pocket sized book. I’d right down the main thoughts and concepts I learned from each book I read. It made reading take a bit longer but it also was very helpful for the comprehension. Well the use of this journal led to an idea about writing a book. I told myself that once I filled the journal, I’d have enough base research content to write a book of my own… well, that hasn’t happened. I probably read about 25 books that year… filled about 1/3 of that little book too. And then I got too caught up in my involvement outside of classes and socializing. I also started to develop a bit of an ego.
Overtime, I think this ego and my schedule made me slowly stop reading as much. I thought I knew everything. Probably spend more time talking instead of listening… I was too busy acting that I let my learning and consumption of material outside the classroom slowly diminish. Truth be told, I probably only read about 2-3 books a year now outside of MBA course books and case studies.
Maybe a better rule for me to follow would be to both write and read 200 words a day… funny how 200 words a day of reading feels like such a joke but 200 of writing feels like a doable chore, but still a chore in comparison to reading.
Back to goal setting and writing… because I’m pretending that is what this whole rambling of mine has been about.
So here it is…. As of Yesterday, Monday Oct. 7th there are 86 days left in 2019. So I’m going to commit to writing 17,200 words in before 2019 starts.
Here are some rules I’m giving myself.
- The goal for each day is 200 words
- The goal for each week is 1400 words as a result.
- Shit happens and a day (Like yesterday) might be missed from time to time. In the case that a day is missed, the following day is allowed to cover a previous day’s missed words. BUT Only 200 words per missed day can be recovered. Aka, I’m not allowed to write 1400 words in one day and count it as having completed a weeks worth of writing.
So I just set up a spreadsheet to track all of this writing. I’ll be curious to see what data points I have at the end. It should be fun. Maybe, just maybe, this will lead to me making a lofty goal of writing a book in 2020…
Thanks for reading this rambling… I know my site has gotten dark and heavy at times. And it will continue to have dark and heavy content. But I also want there to be more light hearted content as well… more of a conscious flow of various thoughts… because in the end, mental health is about all thoughts… positive and negative, taking inventory of them, expressing them, and learning from them as time goes on.
Ultimately, this process should lead to continued understanding of myself as I allow mental health to be a focus in my life moving forward.
Thank you all so much for supporting my writing and journey…. Some exciting stuff is on the horizon and I’m so excited to have all of my readers along on this journey!
Behind The Suit 