The 30 Day Trial

I've been reading Bryan Cohen's book, Sharpening the Pencil, essays of writing, motivation, and enjoying your life. It's very good. It's got me reaching for the pencil - ok laptop - on more than one occasion. One of the pieces is a step by step plan to 30 days of success. He talks about how you can be overwhelmed by goals, such as setting out to write a novel, and that breaking it down into smaller goals is the given advice. He doesn't hold with this. It's still the same huge goal disguised as a series of smaller ones. So he decided on the 30 day trial - similar to a 30 day free software trial. Basically you set your goal - writing for a set period of time or a set number of pages per day - and you do it for 30 days straight. Then you quit. Only when the 30 days is up, you're more than likely to be so fired up that you carry on.  And because there's an end date it doesn't seem so daunting. I would add that, NaNoWriMo aside, you don't try to write the whole novel in the 30 day period. That's unlikely to go well. But the idea is good.

So, I'm going for it. In October I will write for 30 minutes a day. Every day. Without fail. It may not be words of a novel; it may be a blog, short story, plotting ideas for new stories, anything writing related. Facebook doesn't count. Sadly. I'd be sorted if it was.

I'm looking forward to it actually. As I'm not working on a specific novel at the moment (waiting for Lovely Agent to get back to me re Lovely Novel) so it'll be interesting to see what I end up with after 15 hours of writing. I'm hoping to come up with new ideas, sparkling stories, and lots of inspiration for future projects. We'll see!