So, here we are with the New Year well underway. I don't generally make much more specific a resolution than "get a book out the door." With a "day job" and being a wife and mother included into the bargain, that's pretty hefty. My set minimum at this point is a page per day. That may not seem like much, but that's the point. I can go over as much as I want, but I have to at least spit out one page of words. Daily. That, for me, can be a stretch, but it’s not impossible.
The reason people don't keep their resolutions is that they are too big and too amorphous to seem achievable. For authors, a nebulous "get a book out the door" can be a big old "Kick Me" sign for writer's block. If, however, we are to chop up that resolution into smaller bits, it becomes something of a daily finish line. One page isn't much. This blog post amounts to approximately one page, for example. One page a day, over the course of thirty days, is an average of 7500 words!
See? Not so hard, is it? My personal difficulty is shutting off my internal editor so that I can get the words onto the page in the first place. As Nora Roberts says, you can fix a bad page, but not a blank one. If I’m going to get that raw material to work with, I need to learn to spit the words out. I intend to work on that over the course of the year. One page at a time.
Good luck with your own resolutions!
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