I am a little less than a year into taking my writing career seriously. I have about twelve stories that I consider marketable, two of which have been published already. Although my goals and ambitions change daily, I have slowly developed my own writing system.
My rules for writing:
- My goal is 1,000 words a day, which I achieve about fifty percent of the time.
- If I start a short story, I must finish it in seven days (this includes editing, research, corrections, and re-writes).
- I submit my work about every two weeks. More if possible.
- Do something every day that will help my writing career. Writing is the obvious thing. But if I can’t write I read books, research markets, glance at writers’ magazines, make outlines, work on blog, etc.
- Always be nice to the people at the post office. You will be spending a lot of time and money there. It never hurts to have friends.
- Always type out mailing labels for your submission envelopes. It just looks professional. And that’s how you want to be seen—as a professional.
At this point, I feel like my rules suit my needs. Everyone is different, and you have to discover your own way to get your stories out. I hate it when people say there is only one way to do something. A perfect example of this is comments concerning the time of day people write. Many people claim “real writers” write during the day. Or get up at 5 AM and write for two hours before work. Ugh, that ain’t going to happen my friends! I have a day job. Besides, I really, really like to sleep. I can only write at night. After the kids go to bed is my magic time. Sometimes on weekends, when my daughter is napping, I can get some great paragraphs, but not much. I’m a night person. My best work comes out with the moon.
On this note, it is time to go. The moon is out and I need to form paragraphs that will turn into stories. Although this post is about 380 words long, I still need to pound out 620 more to get my daily quota. How many more words do you have to write?
Hi Rebecca, just wanted to mention that Glimmer Train has an open fiction contest with a deadline of 3/31. the link is in my latest blog post, but if you have stories ready to go, they have nice cash prizes and are a high quality literary journal.
ReplyDeleteThe 1K a day is a really awesome goal...since I finished my novel, I've been spending most of my time promo'g it and not enough time writing the next book in the series etc.
ReplyDeleteIt's cloudy and rainy here in Sac though and for some reason I write best when the weather is dreary. I'm off to hit my 1000 :D