How to Quickly Start Your Writing Project in Two Weeks
If you’ve been thinking about writing a novel, writing a play, keeping a diary, or simply keeping a record of what you’ve experienced during this strange year of the pandemic, you can start by committing to jotting down a few words on paper. daily.
Maybe a thousand.
Every day.
For two weeks.
Jami Attenberg , author of seven novels including The Middlesteins, All Grown Up and the recently published All This Could Be Yours , is set to launch the third annual 1000 Words of Summer project, in which writers of all levels commit to writing 1000 words every day. fourteen days in a row.
It’s a bit like sprinting alongside a 50,000 words a month marathon called NaNoWriMo . The barrier to success is much lower: you only need to write 14,000 words, and you don’t have to do it in one of the busiest months of the year.
This year’s 1000 Words of Summer kicks off on Friday, May 29th and runs through Thursday, June 11th. Writers who subscribe to the 1000 Words of Summer newsletter will receive daily emails with offers of support and advice from Attenberg and other authors (already received in previous years). including contributions from Lauren Groff, Andrew Sean Greer and Celeste Ng).
I drafted 1000 Words of Summer in 2019 and added 14,013 words to a novel I was writing at the time. It’s worth noting that I couldn’t count 1000 words every day; some days I wrote less than 1000 words, and some days I wrote more. It’s also worth noting that it took me about 90 minutes to write 1000 words of fiction (just 21 hours in two weeks); I kept track of how much time I spent on the project , and it was a serious commitment for me.
But the real goal of the 1000 Words of Summer project is not just to create 14,000 words in two weeks. It will also help you develop a regular writing habit, also called writing practice . If you only have 30 minutes to write every day, it’s better than not wasting time at all. If you write 1000 words every day for two weeks and build enough momentum in your project to write 500 words every other day by the end of summer, you will have 34,000 words written for Labor Day. If you start 1000 Words of Summer, skip a day here and there and end up adding 9000 new words to your novel, well … that’s a victory, isn’t it?
If you’ve been thinking about writing more – or if you’ve been asking yourself how you can fit writing into your life – why not try 1000 Words of Summer and see what happens? If you don’t have a romance or similar project in your head, start by writing down your thoughts and feelings. Make the decision to write roughly 1,000 words on paper every day, whatever they are, and see what happens if you spend two weeks developing your daily writing practice.
If you are lucky, you will continue to write long after the 1000 Words of Summer runs out.