Since it is the new year and you are supposed to have a resolution/goal/something to fail at, I have set a couple for myself this year. Physical resolutions are great to fail at. Oftentimes, people are done with theirs before even today. My physical resolution for the year is to get into better shape. In order for a resolution to have any real teeth, it needs goals. My goals to make a better me physically – I will perform a single pushup, crunch, and squat for each day of the year, compounded. It is the 19th today and I did the 19 pushups, crunches, and squats this morning. I also added a few chin-ups. It doesn’t sound like a lot. But, by the end of the year I should be doing well over three hundred a day. Look out Mr. Universe.
Mental resolutions are harder to do. At least I think so. It is easy enough to say, “I am going to write a novel by the end of the year.” or “I will write four publishable short stories by the end of the year.” Each of these are indeed nice resolutions. They both have something that is attainable, measurable for success, and you can have goals for them. To measure that success, I want to set a goal similar to the physical resolution. Something easily attained and I can build it up. Words, pages, or hours per day. This is where it gets harder. I can write for hours, and at times, only get a few hundred words down on paper. Even then they can smell worse than the laundry I forgot to throw into the dryer the day before. Words per day seems too hard for me to maintain. Pages per day would be in the same place as well. That really leaves hours per day. So, I have set a goal to write a minimum of 1 hour per day increasing that by an additional one half hour per month. That should be easy to attain and I will gradually increase the writing load minimum. Granted, I will likely write for more than an hour each day, but that minimum will keep me in line and off the couch.
I have taken some time over the last few months researching a story or two, writing a couple, and doing what I can to learn the craft of writing fiction. I read three ‘self-help’ books on the craft of writing. Reading other writers’ blogs is interesting as well. The general gist is that every writer has a different method, procedure, or psychic process that they employ. Mr. Cleaver, in “Immediate Fiction,” drives home something that I think centers in good writing. “Want, Obstacle, Action.” This is probably the title of a 101 class in a Fine Arts school that I didn’t attend. I have heard it a few different ways substituting those three words with some variation of synonym from all different kinds of writers trying to tell us how to write.
Overall, I have found that writing is a bit like chess. It takes a relatively short period of time to get the movement of the pieces, order of operations, and a few strategies. However, it is a lifelong pursuit to a perfect game that one may never achieve. Oh, but what fun it is to play!
Here are a few websites/blogs that I have ran across that might interest you:
The Grinder – A free listing of paying markets for submitting your short work. You can set up a login and track your submissions if you wanted to.
Paper Beats World – Writer blog by Nicole Ford. She recently had a flash story published on Every Day Fiction titled Favorite.
Happy New Year, and keep writing and reading.