February's Writing Goal Results

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Written by Kodi Wolf at 6:18 PM

I did it. I brainstormed on Lights of Life and wrote at least 500 words every day for the month of February.

My total word count was 20,339, which averages out to 701 words per day. My lowest words per day was 509 and my highest was 1,337.

The main thing I learned is that I need to write every day. I feel more like me when I'm writing. It also solidified the lesson that I can be creative even when I'm in pain and groggy from drugs. I'm not as creative and it can be quite a struggle to make my brain work, but in 500 words I can usually come up with at least one little thing that makes me feel like it was worth the 10-15 minutes of effort (and then I can comfortably go back to being brain dead).

My new goal for March is to work on the outline for Lights every day. I want to create a scene by scene synopsis that I can use to guide me in writing the rest of the story (and complete my previous rewrites). I've already done some work on the outline and it's been so cool to see the story come together, but I know it will be more difficult than the brainstorming has been. Based on my records for February, I was able to knock out 500 words in as little as 11 minutes, but on days where I worked on the outline or did research, the time increased to as much as 4 hours.

Organizing scenes to create a blueprint for my writing will take more thought and a lot more decision making, so I'll need to be careful of decision fatigue and burnout. Doing my 500 words every day always felt like a win, even when it was hard. I want to feel the same way as I work on the outline. I have a few ideas about how I can do that, but it's probably going to take some tinkering, so I'll need to cut myself some slack.

Well, here we go...