grind

I feel like writing more about the nature of persistence, because “persistence” is a quality I feel like I’m badly missing right now. I struggled a few days ago with the idea of writing, writing, writing despite my desire to take a day off, but I think today is actually the day where it’s the hardest.

I don’t know why, either. I actually had more time today to write; I actually thought of a few ideas that could have served as sparks about which to write. Some were actually halfway decent.

Every time I thought of something – “Gee, I should write that” – I just couldn’t muster the energy to actually sit down and write. I guess “energy” is not the right word – I had the energy, I just didn’t have the will to sit down and commit the time to actually writing the idea, trying to flesh it out beyond a seed of an idea.

I’m still there. I’m just writing because I have a streak going, and I don’t want to lose the streak. I keep track of it with a community of fellow writers, you know, and I hate to let them down – even figuratively – by breaking my own streak and commitment.

I could always lie, of course. I could record that I had written something, and just not include a url – most of the writers don’t publish daily like I do. But I do publish daily, and I don’t lie. Part of my commitment to the challenge is to publish every day, and publish the url, so I have the accountability to myself and to my fellow writers.

But it’s very hard. I almost chose to break the streak through ennui, which would have been honest but … I value that streak. I value the idea that I’m making it through. I value the idea that I might actually make my streak – even if my recorded streak isn’t as long as my actual streak. (I signed up for the community after I’d started writing every day, and I missed recording a day, even though I’d published.)

So I’m not happy with what I’m writing right now – it seems paltry and weak, uninspired and uninspiring. I’m sorry, whoever is reading this. I’m trying to reach deep within to forge a sense of will, such that I’m forcing myself to write, and as a result, what I’m writing is crap.

Can’t be helped. I just don’t think I have anything better in me right now. What I want to do is sleep; what I’m doing is sitting at a keyboard, trying to spit out words the best I can.

And I have seventy words left to go. I’m tempted to use a pulp writer’s trick, and use a word over and over again (and over and over again) to build up word counts. Is that cheating?

Probably.

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

When I get on a tear, 500 words is nothing – I tend to write more than that per day anyway, on various things and to various people. The challenge there is “getting on a tear.” When I’m writing, I usually have something to say (that’s why I’m writing, right?) and I tend to try to say it. That means that for this entry, I’ve already said what I felt I needed to say:

The 500 Words challenge (where you write 500 words a day for thirty-one days) has two primary aspects to it that make it, well, a challenge: the word count (at least 500) and the duration (thirty-one days, straight.)

Since I’ve already said what I wanted to have said for this post, everything else is a grind – I’m basically rehashing what I’ve already said, expanding, fleshing out. It’s like writing an Amplified Bible or something, where every word has alternate meanings or synonyms – writing by thesaurus.

It goes against most of the habits I’ve tried to develop, habits against chasing rabbits for the sake of chasing rabbits.

I don’t mind the freedom to go into more depth, to be sure – in some ways, I find writing for the web constrictive, because I don’t think very simply in the first place. So my natural writing style would be fluid and verbose, as I describe a pattern, then try to click it into place around a theme to make a point.

But the web doesn’t work that way; people scan, they don’t look for patterns. So for the web, I write more directly, I try to pull out the themes and points, and use that instead of my natural form of communication or description.

So what happens here is that I start with my thesis statement – my theme – and work from there as usual, and I try to flesh it out as if someone were to be interested in it (also as usual), and then… I find myself running out of steam around 400 words. Every time. I’m at … this is word 370, and I am now reaching.

The other side of the challenge is the duration not of the writing, but the challenge itself. Thirty-one days, straight, is a lot. I could see “every weekday for a month” as being a lot easier, honestly, because you’d have the downtime of knowing you had those days off to recharge or observe, to build something that could be written about.

But the nature of the challenge is to avoid that. The nature of the challenge to me is that I honestly want to try to publish every day – here – in addition to whatever else I may write. (I’ve published at least five other things during the time I’ve been on the challenge so far, on other sites.) But I want to build traffic up here, too, and part of that is having content.

Hopefully I’ll succeed at the challenge – and hopefully I’ll see more traffic, too.

Almost impossible to write today

I’m grinding out words already.