Take the 2,000 word challenge

 from 365 Affirmations for the Writer

February 8

First Drafts

Writing a first draft is like groping one’s way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you’ve forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one’s mind comes to inhabit the material fully.
― Ted Solotaroff, author and literary critic

 

February 9

First Drafts

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
― Joyce Carol Oates

 

Do not stop. Do not lift your pen from the page, but for the next 15 minutes write. Write about anything. Just something.

 

February 10

It’s Hard

Let’s say it’s a mess. But you have a chance to fix it. You try to be clearer. Or deeper. Or more eloquent. Or more eccentric. You try to be true to a world. You want the book to be more spacious, more authoritative. You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind. As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head. You try to liberate it. You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be — what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be. You read the sentences over and over. Is this the book I’m writing? Is this all?

― Susan Sontag, New York Times, “Writers on Writing”

 

February 11

Writers in Action

From Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath, we learn that John Steinbeck wrote about 2,000 words a day, all in longhand, averaging about 5 days a week, for 4 months! He did not do this in ease and comfort. His journals reveal that at the time there were construction projects, visitors to be welcomed, sometimes ill health, and always self-doubt. Sounds like a lot of us, right? Yet every day he set a goal and stayed focused on the work.

 

Right now: Take the 2,000 word challenge. Sit down and write 2,000 words. You will be a real Steinbeck if you come back the next day and do 2,000 more.