This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up? Welcome side hustle school listeners, friends and community. My name is Chris Guillebeau, so glad you're here. Welcome to a new week as well. Today is the 12th of October, episode 1381.
And the year known as 2020, it's also known as lots of other things at this point continues. So as we begin this week, I wanted to say, I hope you are okay. Hope you are holding up whatever it is you're dealing with. I know lots of people around the world are dealing with so many different things. So I'm thinking of you.
We're all in this together one way or another. Now let's talk today about writing. Writing is a form of communication. And ultimately, almost all writing is persuasive. This is something I really believe unless you're writing in a journal, like private notes to yourself or something like a diary.
If you're writing anything that is to be shared, ultimately you're trying to demonstrate your knowledge and convince the reader of something. So you're trying to persuade. And if you want to improve, if you want to write more, if you want to get better at it, you start by writing more. It's somewhat circular, but I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Today's caller is hoping to improve her writing streak.
How can we help her keep writing 1,000 words a day? That's what we're gonna talk about. We'll hear from her after this message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hi, Chris, this is Kara from Ann Arbor. And I've been following your projects since the art of nonconformity.
I read that you write 1,000 words a day. And I want to emulate that habit, but it's a struggle. I get on a hot streak for a while, but then I get stuck. And before I know it, it's been two weeks since I've written anything. Do you have any tips to keep it going?
Thanks, Chris. Can't wait to hear from you. [Music]
Thank you so much, Kara. I'm so glad you are writing more and are hoping to increase that writing. And now, first of all, let me just come clean here because people ask me all the time about this 1,000 words a day habit.
I did have that habit for several years, and I still write a fair amount. When I'm working on a book, I try to work in those 1,000 word chunks. But to be transparent, I'm not actually maintaining that habit seven days a week at the moment. That was something I did in probably the first half of my online writing career. And then I started podcasting and doing events, and I guess I don't do events anymore.
But the point is I don't have that 1,000 word streak at the moment, at least not consistently. But I would say, first of all, if you end up in that two-week lull, this is pretty common. All of us with all of our creative projects are something we're trying to work on. We're excited about it for a while. We have the motivation, and then we stop.
We get busy with other stuff. And if this is important to you, don't beat yourself up. Just go back to it. Just go back and start again, because today can begin your one-day streak, and then tomorrow it's two days, and then on from there. But to go back as well to the 1,000 words, I liked that number because it's doable yet substantial.
If you can write 1,000 words a day, even allowing for the fact that much of your work will be discarded or edited, it's not all gonna be good, but that's okay. Over time, you're going to end up with a fairly large body of work. And it's more than enough to write a book in less than a year, as well as numerous essays or blog posts or manifestos or reports or something entirely different. It could be eBooks or guides or something you're creating for sale. A lot of writers use a Pomodoro-like method.
That's the method where you have a timer and you set it for 20 minutes or 30 minutes or however long you sit down and you do that work. And you take a short break and you go back to it and do it more. And I do that as well. It does help me be focused, especially with my ADD. But ultimately, I don't measure my writing based on the time I spend with it, but rather what's produced.
So the Pomodoro method helps me actually do it, but I measure or evaluate it based on what I actually create. And that's why I had that 1,000 words a day quota for myself. And by the way, if 1,000 words a day seems like too much, start with 500. 500 is also doable yet substantial. If you write 500 words a day every day for a year, you're gonna end up with a lot of great work, even as you discard and edit some of it.
So maybe one more tip here. Like I understand that we live in busy times. I do think that the deep work method is ideal where you're able to kind of carve out a couple of hours whenever possible to work on something creative. But as I said, I know that we live in busy times. So something that helps me is if you come to a point in your writing, perhaps you've been working for a while, you have a good page or two, whatever it is, and you're not stuck, like you know what comes next, that's a good place to stop because then you know what to do when you next sit down for a writing session.
You don't sit down and think, oh, I was stuck. How do I get out of this? Instead, you're like, oh, here I am, let me write the next thing. And then that kind of leads you on, you know, hopefully to the thing after that. Or if you do get stuck, it's when you're already in that creative flow.
So those are my tips. I certainly don't know at all. This is something I continue to learn as well from lots of other people, but I hope it's helpful to somebody out there. Now listeners, if you have a question of your own, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We're gonna continue to feature them along with updates from other listeners as they launch and grow their own projects.
I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much for listening. Much more is coming up. So be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
