The first writing sessions proved very productive. Exhaustively so. I’m attempting a hybrid approach to productivity. By “hybrid,” I mean I’ve blended elements of writing disciplines from two different authors I admire.
The first is J K Rowling, who sat with a pen and paper, just writing, for the better part of the day. Then Ms. Rowling would take what she’d written home, and type it up on an old school type writer. This is how the majority of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone first got drafted.
The second author is Brandon Sanderson. He made a deal with himself while writing his first manuscripts. He told himself that if he wrote 10 pages, he could reward himself with a leisure activity.
The first and second writing days proved very productive. I sat down with a certain number of blank sheets each day, and continued until I had filled both sides of all the sheets. In these first pre-sessions, I expanded roughly the first three paragraphs of text from my outline into those pages, and then read the story out loud into a no-frills word processor that’s aimed at clearing distractions for writers to get writing done.
The end result: 4,158 words between both sessions. I’m thinking, though, that if I continue at this pace, I will burn out. From now on, I will simply use 3 loose leaf pages, numbered on each side. This will allow me to produce at a steady rate, consistent.
The goal isn’t just to get words on a page, but to find a good balance between the quantity of words and the quality of writing. While this is the beginning of the story, I cannot, in good conscience, count these words towards the final word count for the school project, because they were written outside of the thirty days designated for the project.
Cadence McKinnon 