Two Pages a Day
Children’s author and Newbery Award winner Kate DiCamillo used to say at readings that for years, she called herself a writer but didn’t write. When she finally got serious about it, she set herself a two-page-a-day goal, and has been doing that, with eventual great success, ever since.
My own fiction writing habit has tended to follow a feast-or-famine pattern. It is only recently, in the months following the birth of my second child, that I realized I had to set a small, realistic goal (oh, Freud, why do I always type it as “gaol”?) to make any progress, post-Guppy. I borrowed Kate’s 2-page-a-day idea. And it’s working.
On many days I have just enough time while the boys nap to write two pages and a quick blog entry. Some days I even write–gasp!–three pages. I’m making progress, and the confidence I’ve gotten as the page numbers pile up is very heartening in my current state of sleep deprivation.
Of course, the house is a mess, and there are piles of things everywhere. But I’m writing. I’m also proving what I’ve found in the past, which is that writing begets more writing. I’m at no loss for things to post about on the blog, and my current draft of novel #2 is coming along nicely in its 2-page increments.
This draft is my third start of novel #2. The first draft and first start was during NaNoWriMo 2004. I let it sit till I felt ready to send out novel #1 to editors, then picked it back up. My writing group and I agreed that parts of it had potential, but it wasn’t a sequel to #1. I started again, trying it from the point of view of a new character. It still didn’t feel right until I introduced a second voice, then a third and a fourth. Now I’ve got four characters telling the story, and I feel a fifth is on the way. Parts of my original draft are salvageable, but most of the current draft is new. Right now that feels fun and exciting, not like work, so I’m pretty sure this draft is heading in the right direction at last.