“I will try anything to break through my own perfectionism and dull literal-mindedness, my need to explain everything, my need to defend. I can be a very slow writer, prone to fidgetiness and second-guesses. What I’ve found helpful recently is to give myself the writing equivalent of stress tests. I’ve never done NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but two summers ago I attempted to write a novel in a week, aiming for 50,000 words and managing 35,000. This past Labor Day weekend, I tried to write a novel, a novella really, one hundred pages or so, in three days, and succeeded. Results vary in terms of the content thereby produced: I’m revising my three-day novella and have generally positive feelings towards it, but I haven’t done anything further with the 35,000-word draft from my week-long novel and don’t really plan to. Regardless, after writing 10,000 words in a day, 2,000 becomes a much calmer and more manageable thing. It helps to remind yourself that ultimately you are only putting words on a page.”
—James Tadd Adcox, author of Does Not Love (Curbside Splendor, 2014)
Photo credit: Jacob S. Knabb