A common piece of advice I’ve heard from countless successful authors is that to succeed at writing you simply have to show up and do it.
Get into a habit of writing every day and NEVER give up.
It’s comforting to know that other writers have had the same issues I’ve had and yet were able to overcome (or outsmart) them, to go on to commercial writing success.
I want to make a living at my fiction so I’ve got to really step up my game here in the second half of 2016 if I’m to write more stories.
This means getting into the habit of writing every day. Or as Dean Wesley Smith does, get into a writing streak.
I’m still working out the details, but the plan is to write one short story per week (challenging for me, but probably not for some) and two novels this year.
It’s simply a matter of (gasp!) math, but if I only have 2 hours per day to write and can do a minimum of 500 words per hour (which is a little below my average) that means I’ll be able to write 1000 words per day.
Not a lot of words, but it’s more than I’m doing now, right?
So if a short story has about 7,000 words in it, I can easily write a story per week. Not sure how I’ll do the novels, but I’m thinking I’ll need to get faster (which should happen as I keep practicing) and/or find more time to write to be able to do them.
Lots of fun! (no sarcasm, it’s fun to write) And lots to learn.
David N. Alderman
I too have been trying to get into a writing streak. I tend to wait until NaNoWriMo each year to really step on the gas when it comes to my writing, but that backfires on me because then I just spend the rest of the year filling in the other 50,000 words and ignore the rest of my writing projects. I’ll be getting back to my Friday Muse pieces this week to discipline me to write each and every week, but like you, I need to formulate a more definitive plan on how to get more fiction out there so this writing can start ‘paying the bills’.