What counts as writing?

Many years ago, I read some famous author saying that to make a living as a writer, you needed to treat writing like a job.  You punch in, do the work, day in and day out.  A few years ago, I was trying to think of some way to boost my writing, so I decided to try making it a job.  The first thing I needed to figure out was how many hours a week I wanted to write.  I quickly decided on 42, because that works out to six hours a day, and it’s also The Answer.  If I had six hours a day to write, that would be great, but I also have a part time job to pay the bills.  So instead of trying for 42 hours of writing each week, I go for 42 minus however many hours I work that week.  (I’ve also started counting my commuting time.)  So this gives me my weekly goal of hours of writing.

But what exactly is an hour of writing?  If I sat down and started typing, “Chapter 1, It was a dark and stormy night,” and continued for an hour, we’d agree that would count as writing.  (I never said it had to be good writing.)  But what if I sat down the next day and spent an hour revising what I had written?  Would that also count as an hour of writing?  I decided that, no an hour of revising would only count as thirty minutes of “writing.” I set this up years ago as a trial and I’ve just continued to do it, so I don’t remember my exact reasonings, but I believe it is because I can get stuck just doing revision after revision after revision.  Part of my goal was to put more words on the page, not just polishing the ones already there.  By only counting revising as half the time, I should be more motivated to write stories.

But what about blogging?  Some of my blogs are just random thoughts I’d like to put out to the world, but I have to admit part of it is the hope that someone goes, “This guy has an interesting take on … exploring Mercury, I wonder what their fiction is like.” It’s a slim hope, but we have to do what we can.  Just to keep things simple, I decided that an hour of blogging would also only count as thirty minutes of writing.  Even blogs about writing, which I don’t care to think too much about otherwise I’ll give myself a headache.

The final writing related thing I decided to count as writing, is social media crap.  Because it doesn’t really matter how many stories or blogs I write if they’re never seen by anyone.  So I spent time each week on Mastodon and Bluesky, just trying to find new people who might take an interest in anything of mine.  But I do see spending time on social media as less important than blogging, and so I don’t waste too much time, an hour on social media I only count as six minutes of “writing.”

I’ve been doing this for years, and I don’t know if I’ve ever actually hit my goal.  I think the only time I came close was when I picked up some extra shifts and worked thirty-some hours, meaning I only needed to write for a couple hours that week.  But even then I don’t know if I made it because I also basically have a third job of taking care of a bunch of stuff around the house, which usually leaves me too tired to do anything but veg in front of a screen binging shows or YouTube videos. 

I still write, just not as much as I want to.  I guess I need to come up with some new motivation to make sure I put in the time.  Any suggestions?

3,000 Days!

If I’ve mathed correctly, then today – after I spent ten minutes polishing up a story just after 1 AM – marks the 3,000th day that I’ve “written” something.  Apparently, the last day I didn’t “write” was January 26, 2017.  Which, you have to admit, is rather impressive.

You’ll note that I did say “written” something, because to be perfectly honest there were probably hundreds of those days where I wasn’t feeling well, or had 8,000 other things going on, so I just opened up whatever story I was working on, typed “And they lived happily ever after,” and called it a day knowing full well that would be deleted the next time I got around to actually working on the story.  Not to mention the days when I realized I hadn’t written something about 11:55 PM, and just went and changed a word just to say I did something.

A few months ago I wrote a post on You’re allowed “sick” days, where I talked about writing every day and I didn’t know if I’d continue after hitting 3,000 days.  Now that I’m here … I mean, it’s not that far off to ten years. 

Random Writing Tips – Some quick tips

 

The way I usually come up with these tips is I’ll think of something – usually while at work or while driving to work – make a note of it, and then forget about it for a few weeks or months until I need to write a post.  Then I’ll go through the notes to see what I can do.  But sometimes what I figure is a good idea, can’t really be stretched to more than a paragraph or two.  So here are some of these quick tips.

Be careful with slang

This started when I got a notice that someone had replied to a YouTube comment.  I read the reply and didn’t know what they were talking about.  Turns out, it was a reply to a comment I made a year or so earlier.  I went back to that video, read my comment and I think a couple earlier replies, then the new reply, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Part of it was they used a term I had heard the kids use but only had a vague idea of the meaning.  I looked it up, got the official definition, but still didn’t know what they were talking about.  Either there is some other meaning to this word, or they didn’t make their case that clearly.  So if you use the hip new slang all the kids are using, just know there’s a chance some of us old fogies won’t know what you’re saying.  But old fogies aren’t the target audience, so what does it matter?  On one hand, you can’t write something that will be of interest to everyone, but on the other hand, the more people that can understand your writing means the more people likely to read it.  There is a balance one needs to find.

A Something File can be useful

This began with a microfiction story I wrote.  At some point I had started a “To Do” file, where if I had an idea – for a story or general thing to do – I could just open it and type out my idea.  And then every few months I’d clean it out and find better places for the story ideas.  Sometimes, when I wasn’t feeling well, I’d open this file to just write “something” so that I could say that I had written something that day.  I was thinking about it one day and decided that I’d keep the “To Do” file for non-writing ideas but I should start a new “Something File” just for my writing ideas.

Sexbots

Years ago, there was this site – which is still up but the pages are corrupted – where you could post stories of a few hundred words.  One day, I wrote a story with “Sexbot” in the title, and in about a day it had more views than some of my stories got in a week.  Sometimes, it can be useful to jazz a title up a bit, to get more notice.

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Image from Pixabay.