Marta was wondering a few days ago about writerly magic numbers: specific quantifiable targets which writers hope to achieve within some given time period. She’s doing NaNoWriMo, so of course over her head looms the magic 50,000-words-in-a-November target. But she asked what other writers might choose to be satisfied with: N pages or words per day, or one complete draft or book by date X, or whatever.
In a long, wool-gathering post back in September, among other things which I scavenged for the point(s) I was making, I mentioned an ambitious project by artist Rowena, a/k/a Warrior Girl/Mama: to create 100 pieces of art in a 100-day block of time. It just knocked me out (it still does) that she managed to pull that off.
Yes, it knocked me out, and made me very happy; although it wasn’t writing but art, it confirmed what I’ve believed for many years now. To wit: To get really comfortable doing something creative, you have to do it every single day. None of this vaporous swoony “Oh, I must wait for inspiration to strike!” nonsense. None of those “But I just have so many things on my mind/distractions to deal with!” excuses. Just do it. Every day.
Turns out someone else took inspiration from Rowena’s experiment: pseudonymous RAMH friend The Querulous Squirrel.
Her blog has always (to me) been an odd — charmingly odd — little corner of the universe. Her posts there usually but not always have presented short little fictional vignettes, and until recently she posted them on no particular schedule. Maybe once per week, maybe two or three times. Sometimes she’d go for weeks without posting anything at all.
(The site exhibits other anomalies for a blog, especially one based on Blogger. The sidebar menu includes no archive listing, for example. You can scroll backwards and forwards through the entries using the Older Post and Newer Post links at the foot of each one; otherwise, it’s as if she’s challenging you: You want to read the site? Fine. Read it, but don’t expect me to help you. Read it every day.)
Anyway, Squirrel decided in September to embark on the same challenge chosen by Rowena: to create 100 separate works in 100 days. In Squirrel’s case, the products are little fictional nuggets: some explicitly fiction, others less certainly so, and some more or less crusty, others more or less polished.
And I gotta say, it’s been exhilarating watching her do this. Dizzying. Just last week she passed the halfway mark, and I believe she’s established an unstoppable rhythm (her occasional waverings aside — she turns even them into little ficciones). In fact, the whole project to date puts me in mind of another sort of competition with oneself…
Below, a tribute to her progress so far, in the manner of a Squirrel post: fewer than 400 words, from start to finish.
Run, Squirrel. Run.
[If you'd like to read all the entries she's done so far, the first, title "The Cough," went up on September 23. just start there and keep hitting the Newer Post links.]
—-
She stood on the track, alone, her breath pluming in the early-morning autumn air. Dressed for some sort of sprint, she was, in sleeveless athletic shirt and loose shorts, and her hair was tied back lest it distract her once she started to move.
She wanted no distractions at all once she started to move. She’d stood here too many times before, always allowing herself to be daunted by the distance, by the height of the hurdles, by the clock which ticked relentlessly at the foot of the empty grandstand. Damn clock — marking not just the seconds of the race itself, but the seconds of the race in the context of the minutes of her life.
She carefully positioned her spikes in the blocks. Sucked air in, blew it out, once, twice, three times…
I will master this, she thought. She was sick of knowing exactly what she had to do but not doing it. At root, it was just a matter of putting one foot after another, over and over, as quickly as she could, never looking down, scarcely looking ahead, moving fast enough that the last hurdle and the tape stretched across the track would be behind her before she even knew she was about to reach them. She’d watched others. She’d seen them stumble, hook a toe on a hurdle — and yet she’d also seen them get up, fury in their eyes, and light out for the next hurdle without hesitation. She knew that fury. She’d felt something like it every morning she shut off the alarm the first time it sounded, without actually getting out of bed; she’d felt something like it every time she’d gone cleanly over one hurdle, over two, and then come to a standstill before risking a third.
Momentum, that was the key, the thing to carry her through the fury and past the false starts. Momentum. Keep moving.
She leaned forward at last, dropped to her fingertips. Her knees slightly bent. Every muscle in her lean legs and arms a coiled spring. Tilted her head back. Stared into the emptiness past the first hurdle.
She breathed in. Paused. Breathed out. Paused. Breathed in.
And launched.
That’s a brilliant idea, this 100 pieces in 100 days. Nothing better to push one forward than pushing oneself forward. It’s brilliant, simple, doable. No word count limit? Or is the 400 the ceiling?
That’s very inspirational. And your sprinter piece is nice, too. Thanks!
Darc: Nowhere has The Querulous Squirrel laid out a word-count limit, as far as I know. (The sprinter bit is < 400 words, which is what the number in my post referred to.)
In a note in her blog’s sidebar, Squirrel says:
I don’t know for sure, but I gather her approach is to just start writing each bit — always keeping her mind aware of the limits of the form she’s working in — and doesn’t spend much if any time doing revisions. It’s like the objective for each individual piece mirrors at a small scale the larger objective of the full project: Just get there. Maybe she’ll pop up here to tell us, or just to chitter angrily from the branches.
An interesting thing to see happening is how, over time, the pieces seem less tentative/more confident. The same thing happened, btw, with Rowena’s art project. I’m no judge of art, but the quality of her writing, I thought, jumped almost measurably from start to end. And neither Rowena nor Squirrel are slouches in the writing department; they just got even better, if that makes sense.
I can’t tell you how honored I am. The short form comes naturally to me, so I don’t count words, but I’d say 400 words is a good estimate. It’s the length I think in. I don’t think in longer or shorter. I also don’t think of the larger objective. It’s more one day at a time. If I can do one day at a time, I can go on to do this forever. I’m not really even thinking of 100 as the objective. It’s just keeping me on task. It’s very satisfying to have it as a goal however. Much more so than, say, the abstract dictum of “write every day.” I’m flattered you think my writing is getting better. I often think it is getting worse when I have to force myself to get something, anything out every single day, pull a rabbit out of the hat, so to speak, as in my last two stories that are metaphors for the whole process. Rowena was definitely my inspiration. She just keeps going and going and going. Her artistic process is completely transparent. I admire that greatly and emulate it. It gives me courage to just write whatever comes forth and worry about editing if I ever decide to try to publish something. And most of all, this is enormous FUN, including the comments which are as much fun as the writing itself and so I know I would never have done all this writing if it weren’t for blogging. Thanks so much for this.
Squirrel: In some people’s minds, maybe, a tendency to hop from branch to branch (as it were), never alighting for long — that tendency might be looked down on. “A.D.D.,” they might say. “Flighty.” I say the proof is in the product, and I think what you’ve done so far pretty much closes off all argument on the point.
Of course, you’ve still got 40-some days to go, so I don’t want to give you too much credit just yet… :)
Holy cow. I just did the calculation: 9/23/09 + 100 days = 1/1/10. (Well, technically I guess, it should be + 99 days = 12/31/09.) You must have known that, right??? Way to pick your milestones!
Actually, Rowena picked the date and it was way too good to pass up. “You know, it’s 100 days until the end of the year.” I was ready. What a great way to celebrate the New Year.
Squirrel: Found it, in the comments exchange for “The Sneeze” (posted 9/22). Very funny that later in that same exchange — actually on the 23rd, less than 2 hours before you posted “The Cough” — you said, “I’m a afraid there are no stories left, but I suppose it’s like a chicken laying an egg. There’s bound to be another.”
What a great way to look at it. Although the mingling of the species introduces a certain weird cognitive dissonance.
I love that you guys love the 100 days challenge. I swear, ever since I started on these personal creativity challenges, it has changed who I am as an artist and a writer. I get exhausted a lot, really exhausted. I have to drop other things sometimes, like keeping up on my favorite blogs, but it’s so valuable as an artist/writer to have that commitment, not to inspiration but to the work. The working.
I myself haven’t been so consistent on this last 100 days, probably because I’m kind of trying to do it both in writing and in art which is just NUTS, but I’m so glad that nuts are good for squirrels and our Squirrel is going going going.
Oh, but yeah, the last 100 days of 2009 was deliberate. I’m not the one who called it,but it was deliberate.
It is always an inspiration to see other creative souls at work–and committed, not waiting for the muse to alight.
and the recaptcha: spectators week.
really should be 100 days.
rowena: It’s such a simple but ingenious plan, and seems to instill some sense of fun into the act of creating day-after-day. Like, “I don’t have to feel absolutely great about what I wrote today, because I know I’ve got tomorrow.” As Squirrel said somewhere up there, each of those little 24-hour packets of time is much easier to work with than a grand “write every day, forever” master plan.
When I saw you were doubling up — arting as well as writing — yes, the word “NUTS” (among others) ran through my mind. But you seem to be handling it quite level-headedly so far… especially considering that you’re somehow managing to work it in around the little’uns, in a way that seems to satisfy your maternal soul as well as your creative one.
marta: Yeah!
Albert Brooks’s movie The Muse features Sharon Stone as the embodiment of the main character’s muse. She’s very demanding, and eventually moves in and establishes a better relationship with the MC”s wife than with the MC himself. Some folks from a sanitarium show up to take her away, explaining that she’s not really a, let alone the muse — just a woman who suffers from severe multiple-personality disorder. The movie wasn’t that great, just OK, but I always thought the premise was hilarious. :)
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