How to Write Thousands of Words in 10 Minutes a Day
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Pink flower bouquet with a large white one and zero.
There was little writing happening in the first quarter of the year, so I wanted to kick it up a notch this second quarter. A writing friend was asking about Camp NaNo, and while I’ve always failed camp, I decided this year to leverage it to get the story out.
The goal was to write seventy-five hundred words in April. That's a small goal, but with my writer brain out of practice, I wanted something that wasn’t impossible. My hope was I could write two hundred and fifty words a day. In book talk, that’s about the average of one page of a novel. One page. No stress. Busy fingers.
Day’s one and two were fine. Words got written and there were no tears or muse temper tantrums. Motivation overcame my “I don’t want to” attitude. This might work out.
In my notes, by day eight, I was convinced the devil had written this plan. I used the timer on my watch to make sure I sat at the keyboard and things happened. But I was tired of the book. The ending hadn’t landed, and I wasn’t sure where things were going.
K. Butler
two columns, One for each day of Aoril and the other with how many words I wrote that day.
Easter Sunday, I rested from everything. I always have a to do list running in my head. My parents taught me you play after you’ve gotten everything done. Years later, I still have to get everything done before I’ll slack off. A whole day off from everything was sacrilege.
My rest day revved me back up to get to the keyboard. I hummed along. Everyone got a stomach bug, but I wrote. Had some hard news to process, and I wrote. Our air conditioner broke twice, yet I wrote. You get the picture.
Photo by cottonbro: https://www.pexels.com/photo/colorful-sticky-notes-3831849/
Different colored post it notes on a screen saying Be Kind, Don’t Give Up, Don’t Waste Your Time, Be Yourself, and Get Shit Done,
For me, there is something in the ten-minute timer. When I’m going through my to do list, I see I need to write for ten minutes and read for ten minutes. That’s only twenty minutes. That’s doable. I put my phone down and set my timer and off I’d go.
Was I able to write ten minutes every day? Yup. Did I make it to at least one page of the book a day? Yes. And sometimes I wrote two pages. I pushed to not think and get the words out of me and on the screen.
I wrote over eleven thousand words plus in ten minutes a day in the month of April. No one was more surprised than me. Why did it work so well?
It’s that time thing. You can always make room for ten minutes. No matter how busy you are, you can find ten minutes. All of us stare at our phones for too long. Try writing before you scroll. Ten Minutes. That's it.
All the guilt and punishment, along with anxiety and fear about my writing, fell away. Even though it was such a short duration, I wanted to get to my story. Excitement over your work should be in a steady state. This only happens when I’m consistent. Yes, you must write every day.
Are all the words the best I’ve ever written? No. There are lots of words to be stripped out or moved around. I wrote one scene more for me to figure out something plot wise. That one will go. Not every word written will survive, but I’ve got words to work with. That’s something I didn’t have the entire first quarter of the year.
You have stories that other people need to hear. Maybe tell it in ten-minute chunks of time until you complete the project. I know you can do this. Happy Writing!!!
P.S. Shaunta Grimes and her team run a ten-minute writing sprint almost every morning. I’ve put in one of the videos below. Follow the account and get some extra writing energy.
