Wind Sprints

I really didn't feel like writing yesterday. It was the first day that I've hit the doldrums so deeply since I started this back in July. I never used any of my spare time or lunch break at work to write, I just laid there. Time and time again, I thought, I need to write, but I don't want to. So, I didn't.

I came home from work last night, and now I was up against it. I had to get at least five hundred words, but preferentially closer to 900 if I wanted to make my goal I set for myself on the tenth, and I still hadn't even started.

Yesterday, however, I started reading a book buy an author who Abigail Hilton recommended to me. She said I needed to check out the book, Write to Market by a guy named Chris Fox. I went and looked Chris Fox up, and found he had a whole series of books about writing and publishing beyond just Write to Market. I decided I would read them all.

I picked up two of them to begin with, the aforementioned Write to Market (which is the third book in his writing/publishing series) and the first book in the series called 5,000 Words Per Hour. Well, yesterday I started reading that first book to see what his secrets might be to get to 5,000 words.

The very first thing he tells a writer to try in chapter one is something he calls writing sprints. Take a timer out, and time yourself as you write. Then clear the decks so that nothing will distract you, and write as much and as fast as you can in those five minutes. His first exercise was to do this for five minutes, then count your words, times them by twelve, and that's your speed for one hour.

I read the chapter of the book in the morning, but never did the exercise, so I figured here, at 11:45 at night, I could give it a shot. Maybe having a timer would help me to get to the word count I needed quicker than I would otherwise. After all, it was time to be in bed, and I was just starting my writing instead. Quicker would definitely be preferable. 

I hadn't wanted to write, but putting a timer on it, and trying my best to go as fast as I could really made a difference for me. I typed like the wind, and when the alarm went off after the first five minutes, my word count was 180. Not exactly lighting the world on fire, but 180 x 12 = 2,160. So, my initial wph is 2,160. That's pretty good.

Obviously, I know that's not a real words per hour. That's a wph for five minutes. I'd have to sustain that pace for sixty minutes, which at this point seems unattainable, but still, it's a good start. And it was fun. Writing was feeling like a terrible onus on me earlier, but now, by making a game out of it, I was having a good time.

I tried a second sprint...and screwed up the timer. I realized that I must have passed my five minutes somehow, and looked at my timer, and found that it was counting down from fifteen hours and five minutes. I'd bumped the hour dial by accident somehow.

So, I reset it, and did another five minutes. 179 word this time. The math isn't as clean on that one, but it makes 2,148. Still good.

I did one more, and did far worse, 166 words. That multiplies out to 1,992. I wasn't improving per attempt, but I was getting my words in, and pretty quickly. I checked my word count total, and with the three sprints, the accidental badly timed sprint, and the few words that I'd written in to fix things I'd missed after each sprint, I had 939 words, and I'd done that in probably half the time I'd expected to.

It was time for bed, and I'd gotten through my words way quicker than I'd thought possible. I was expecting to be there for an hour, with my eyes burning, begging me to head for bed. Instead, I cruised through and was heading for bed still feeling good.

This sprint thing is a pretty good idea. I'm excited to see what else he might have for me in the book. It could be worth my time...worth saving my time.