Guilt is a great motivator.
I speak from immediate experience, here. As you may have guessed by now, I'm something of an internet junky. I got up this morning and logged on, for the express purpose of editing a role-playing log to email to my cohorts in the scene.
No sooner than I logged on did Garrett page me to inform me, smugly, that he was working on his thousand words, and what was I doing?
This was completely unfair; I'd actually managed to write a couple thousand words in the days before we started this venture, and was feeling fairly good about myself. Oh, sure, I felt guilty for not having written yesterday or Friday, but as I did intend to log off as soon as I was finished editing the scene and do my writing, I thought he was being unreasonable.
Then again, it certainly did make me log off and get my butt to my word processor. I'm grouchy, though. I do not care for guilt trips.
My mother will attest to this. She used to try to pull them on me, when I was a child. When she was a kid, her mother would pull guilt trips successfully: Mom would assume that if her mother was mad enough to pull a guilt trip, think how angry she would be if Mom didn't do what Grandma wanted her to.
My mind doesn't work that way. If Mom tried to guilt me into doing something, I just got angry. Granted, so did she. My thought process, though, was, "Well, she's this pissed off already, nothing I do is going to make it much worse, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let her ruin my good time because she doesn't think I should do it."
There are those who would say I'm stubborn, or even contrary.
At any rate, much of the purpose of agreeing to write a thousand words a day with Garrett was that so we would have somebody to guilt trip us. I'd merely forgotten how much I resent it. God damn it, I'm responsible enough to do my writing without you nagging me about it, and I'll show you by going to do it right now! Nyah!
I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with my logic there, but what the hell?
My format is, I think, going to be all-together different than Garrett's. For one thing, part of the reason I'm doing this (besides the guilt tripping) is a discussion I had with another online friend of mine a few days ago -- right before I went and bought this word processor I'm working on.
I was angsting (gods forbid) about what to do with my life, how to do my writing when I had to earn a living, and lamenting my inability to hold down a job and write at the same time.
Tok said, in effect: Don't be stupid. You work 40 hours a week. That leaves you plenty of time to do your writing. You just need some discipline. And what's this crap about not being able to write and work at the same time? The world, he said, doesn't owe you a living, Catie. Welcome to the real world. If you want to write, you'd better get your ass in gear and do it.
Ow, I said. I think I needed that, I said.
Set yourself a goal, Tok suggested. In the next year, write one damned fine science fiction novel, and get it published.
It seemed like a pretty good goal, and it provided me with one hell of a boot in the ass.
So I went and did something I'd been wanting to for a long time. I bought myself a cute little Brother word processor, a laptop with a rechargable battery so I can haul it anywhere and write.
Anyway. Where was I? Oh yes. Other formats. So much of the purpose of my thousand words a day is going to be writing on this novel. Not being the sort of person who feels comfortable with handing out bits and pieces of rough drafts for perusal, a lot of my thousand words aren't going to be available on this page. I generally need to go through an initial barf-it-onto-the-paper (screen) phase, and then a Massive Rewrite phase before I'm willing to let people critique what I've written -- the first draft is just too rough to face crushing advice.
This page, therefore, won't update daily. Garrett will have access to the daily thousand words for the novel, to verify I've done them, but I anticipate perhaps one or two essays for this page a week.
Shoot, even if that was all I did at all, I'd be doing 2K words a week better than I've been doing for the last several years, but between Tok and Garrett, and my husband, who watched me turn the computer on a couple of days ago, and said, "Shouldn't you be writing?" (I said, "Yes, I probably should be," but didn't log off. Bad Kit.), I'm feeling fairly confident that I'll be getting several thousand words a week written.
(Mumble. The only disadvantage of trying to write away from the computer is that people keep coming over and talking to me. It may be necessary to actually retreat to somewhere other than this house to do my work. This is the problem: while Ted [the husband] thinks it's work, and doesn't bother me while I'm writing, my parents, with whom we live, don't seem to feel that I'm doing anything that can't be picked up again later and interrupt me all the time. Mutter.)
Grousing aside, I'm looking forward to this venture enormously. Six months from now, maybe sooner, I'll have a rough draft of a book, and a multitude of essays and short stories. A year from now, I intend to have a publishable novel. In between, I'll have to get off my duff and start submitting some of the non-fiction essays I've already written. It's hard for a writer to get published if she doesn't send anything in . . . .
Anne McCaffrey told me I didn't want to be a writer when I grew up. She said it was miserable, thankless work for the most part, the hours were terrible, and there were a lot of more pleasant ways to make a living.
I know she's right.
Elizabeth Anne Scarborough told me the same day to go for it, if it was what I really wanted to do, because it would be the only thing worth doing, even if it was utterly miserable.
She's right, too.