As I’ve mentioned on Twitter (over and over and over) I’m under deadline. I mean really under deadline. Between moving to the next state up, helping out the family with a big to do, and battling allergies and viruses off and on I’m going to be cutting it close to the wire. I needed a way to churn out pages. Then I remembered something my friend Shana Galen told me….
(Before she had a baby) Shana wrote ten pages every morning. Like clockwork. The trick was, she told me, was knowing how long it took her to write a page. She had timed herself and knew it took X minutes to write a page. Then, every day when she started to write, she also started a stopwatch. Once she started writing she couldn’t stop to go to the bathroom, get a drink, or succumb to any other distraction because it would throw off the timing.
The Stopwatch Method
- With the Alphasmart at the ready, I open the stopwatch on my iPhone and click start.
- If I need a mental break (usually after about 25-30 minutes) I stop the timer for a few minutes.
- Then I click start and dive back in.
I’ve done this twice now and here are the results:
Day 1
Time: 1:25
Pages: 14
Day 2
Time: 1:15
Pages: 13
That’s like NINE pages an hour!!!
I’m trying not to think about how I managed to waste all that time before–daydreaming, people watching, doodling, brainstorming. Blah, blah, blah. I could have written twice as many books in the same amount of time.
Why Does it Work?
I think it’s knowing that the clock is ticking. It’s like a race and, as a former competitive swimmer, I know all about racing to beat the clock. It encourages me to stay focused for those short(ish) bursts of time.
Will it work for you? I don’t know. It might not work for me tomorrow, or on the next book, or five years from now. But it’s working for me now. And with my deadline screaming closer, I’ll keep trying until I have to click send. Fingers crossed.
Hugs,
TLC
Thanks for posting, Tera! I'm definitely going to try that. Doing NaNo with my daughter this month, and we've been doing timed races, which is working really well. Probably similar…that push to "beat the clock." or in my case "beat my daughter." In a good way, of course. 🙂
Here's the link to the online stopwatch I used.
http://www.online-stopwatch.com/
And, um, I'm kind of anal, so I would make a log of how long each page took me. I think my best time was a 5 minute page. It was mostly dialogue, though.
Sounds like a plan worth checking out. Melissa Walker has also suggested the converse–literally setting a stopwatch for her internet surfing so that little breaks don't become a huge time suck.