|
Aaaand we're back! Some unexpected happenings this year have required extra care and attention in my little corner of the world, but there are shifts for the better coming up, which means more frequent letters, blog posts, and other exciting things! Let's get to it, shall we? ^_^
What if doing the bare minimum wasn't the lazy path but one to strive for?
What if it was the key to having a more consistent presence in the lives of your characters?
I’m a big fan of doing the bare minimum when it comes to finding time for your writing, especially if it vies with one of your other passions for attention. You can always do something to connect to your story and make forward progress. Sometimes we just have to redefine what that "something" looks like.
Okay, but what is the bare minimum?
It’s important to be realistic about a bare minimum and make it as small a step as possible. When I first considered this concept, my immediate thought was, “Well, my bare minimum is writing 500 words a day.”
If your bare minimum isn’t something you can do when you’re exhausted and have ten minutes to spare, you haven’t gone far enough.
A few examples ...
Bare minimum could be:
- talking to your cats about the plot tangle that has you in knots, and writing down what comes to you on the nearest piece of paper
- taking a prompt from a writing book for kids and not overthinking what you write in response
- jotting down a few lines of dialogue
- dictating the gist of the next scene you want to write into your phone before you go into the grocery store
- having a daily goal of 100 words
Why is this so important?
We all have passions, obligations, responsibilities, and relationships beyond writing that deserve and sometimes require our time and attention.
Having such full lives is usually a blessing, but it also means having strict, hefty goals for our writing could be more limiting than empowering, because it can lead to resentment, not writing at all, burnout, or otherwise paying too high a price.
Any forward momentum is better than no momentum at all.
There’s nothing to say you have to do the bare minimum every day for the rest of your life, but by committing to doing the bare minimum, you’ll either carry on even further than intended, because it’s easier to keep going once you’ve made a start, or you'll at least have a little more than you did ten minutes ago.
Things to reflect on ...
If you were to do the bare minimum for a week, what would that look like? Would you have one specific daily goal or a few possibilities to choose from?
Does the thought of this make you feel twitchy or excited?
How do you think it would feel if, for example, at the end of the month you had 15,000 words written and were exhausted, versus having 5,000 words written and feeling refreshed and ready to keep up the pace?
Is this something that's worth trying for a week to see how it goes?
|
