So I wanted to hit the 50 page mark on April 14th which would have been a day early. I ended up getting sick and getting buried under work and, long story short, my count didn’t budge from 47 pages until today. But today I got up early as if it was a weekend and wrote like a madwoman telling myself I could only stop once my husband woke up. Lucky for me, he was a total slug so I ended up passing not just 50 but 60 as well.
Best part? I’m at the bottom of page 60 so its only a few words away from another page.
I wrote 13 pages this morning in about 3 hours-ish. Of course, you know what this makes me think. I have only 40 pages left, right? If I really apply myself could I finish this thing in four 10 page days? This is crazy talk, of course, but it would be great to get this done early so I can go back to all the other things that April requires of me.
On a side note, I like the little typewriter icon but the Screnzy slogan above is not my favorite. I actually prefer the following one (and wish it were on a better looking badge as its only on this one banner):
I love that. Talk about summing up everything you need to know about the challenge in handy “bring it on” phraseology. Awesome.
I am in, obviously, for a penny and a pound.
I know I am very busy and that these crazy challenges seem to take away time from my real life but I get so much done during these crazy month-long challenges that I really feel like they are worth it. I am already making up a another ridiculous challenge for myself for next month because I need these crazy deadlines. When you look at the rest of the year, I was averaging less than 250 new words a day. This month, because of this challenge, I am averaging 975 new words a day. That is awesome. Talk about injecting more writing into my life.
I want to say, on a side note, if you are not the sort of person who has ever attempted one of these silly month long challenges (and if novels and scripts aren’t your thing, there are many of them: poetry, blog post a day, editing, taking a picture a day, even growing a beard for gods sake) I highly recommend it. The worth of it is far beyond the end result of having something lengthy finished.
So many people whine that they don’t have time to do something like this or they can’t do it and let me tell you, as someone who very genuinely doesn’t have a lot of time on my hands, when you do something like this, you find yourself making time. You bring the laptop into the bathroom and work then if you have to. You plot out scenes while doing the dishes. You maybe read a little less celebrity gossip and fill that time with writing. You get up a bit earlier and discover you love that extra time in your day once you get used to it. And when the month is over, you discover that it is possible to make time in your life for you and what you want to do.
In short, you learn that most of your excuses are not legitimate when put to the test.
On top of that, there is something that feels wonderful about meeting a goal. A challenge like this is a thrilling roller coaster of mini-goals. With Script Frenzy, for example, hitting 10 pages, 20 pages, etc they all feel like amazing accomplishments and in a world where we have so little control over our lives sometimes, having these little victories can help your whole outlook on life, making you feel powerful, special. It doesn’t matter if those 100 pages are total crap or if Bob over there is already at 350 pages, you forced yourself to write those 100 pages on a deadline and met it and that feels great.
But if you don’t see the challenge out there that is right for you, make up your own. Lord knows, I do. 😉 I give myself eBay listing days where I have to list 100 items before I can go to bed or I tell myself I have to write 5 blog posts before I can break for lunch. (I also do things like not allow myself to go to the bathroom until I hit 1,000 words or finish these 10 listings, etc but there is no need for you to be as sadistic to yourself as I am.) These little mini-goals I set for myself not only give me something to shoot for but give me a little boost of confidence when I finish them. If little goals give you a little booster, thing about the difference meeting a big goal makes in your life.
For me, that was the biggest adjustment when I got out into the “real world” after college. Everything was too open ended. Nothing was ever due so how did you motivate yourself to finish anything? Suddenly the only things that seemed to matter, the only things that “had” to get done on a schedule was work and work projects. As a result, it felt like my whole life revolved around my day job with no deadline to ever get any of *my* stuff done. It made the stuff I wanted to do feel unimportant and made time go by far too quickly.
I need a deadline to keep myself on track, but even if you don’t have that issue like me, giving yourself an end date for something actually feels good and makes the pace of life slow down. It forces you to notice the passage of time and develope a realistic idea of how much work you can accomplish in a given set of time. Otherwise you just wake up one day and realize that 5 years have passed since you thought about doing that thing and the worst part about that feeling is that you didn’t even notice that much time had passed, you were so wrapped up in work and being busy.
Some people the busy is the enemy of getting things done. It isn’t, not really. It all comes down to how you parcel out your time and if some ridiculous challenge that you (or the internet) made up is what it takes to get you to pony up and add the stuff you want to do in your life, that’s fine. Challenges like this trick your brain into thinking the things you want to do are important and if they feel important, you’ll treat them as such.
Anyway, just a little pep talk from Hillary.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
