100 Words a Day or Go!

When in doubt the safest bet is lowering the bar although this can backfire if limbo is your game. I shouldn't have to tell you to do the opposite. Not you, because you know better than I. But just in case, I'll put it out there and let you decide what to do with it. After all choices are for the choosing and choosing not to decide is a choice of its own. Whatever it is, it's yours to make and yours to live with.

My current attempt at cobbling prose together and hammering it into paragraphs with or without some continuity is being assembled under the mantle: 100 Words a Day or Go! An obvious mistake on my part (should be 1000 tbh) but I liked it so much we're keeping it. It's only a working title anyway, I'm not married to it.

What's my idea? Well, probably not a good one... I read way too much Dostoevsky or some would say not enough. Fyodor, constructs his worlds slowly and carefully with people that all of us know on some level. If we don't know them when the book starts, by the end we do, which makes the reading all that more enjoyable for me. I'm spending more time on the construction part this time, using an outline as the underlying foundation for my universe.

My wife, who seems to take this stuff harder than I do, got really upset with me when I told her I was yanking the plug on everything and starting from scratch... again. What's a wannabe writer to do though? I've never been a fan of squeezing blood from a stone that's for sure. Hard work is one thing. I'll roll my sleeves up and get it done but I'm big into outcomes. Sure things are the ticket.

So how do you get over that feeling of trying to make an idea that seemed like such a sure thing, work? Is it best to go back to the drawing board or should one attempt the mental hurdles hoping that there's an actual finish line in site at the end of the excruciating, mind numbing, tedious stabs at fashioning words into entertaining, thought provoking, prose?

I hope you're not looking at me to answer that. How about a quote from Richard Bach though: A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

That is something I can buy into. Starting at 1000 words a day will be the first step for me.