Down here in the South, most students have just wrapped up their school year and
begun their summer vacation. Up North, many kids are still hitting the books,
and will continue to well into June. Officially, the calendar says the first day
of Summer is June 21st. But the days have been hot and summery enough lately
that many Southerners consider Memorial Day Weekend the start of the sunny
solstice.
"Summertime and the livin' is easy," said George and Ira Gershwin
(actually, it was DuBose Heyward, the author of Porgy, the novel on which Porgy
and Bess was based). Regardless of whether your daddy's rich and your mama's
good lookin', there are plenty of folks who dispute Porgy's sentiment because
Summer often means juggling even more things than usual. It's not necessarily
bad stuff, just more stuff. We tend to fill our summers with as much as we can,
hoping to make up for all the months when we've worked so hard, feeling like
this is the only chance we have to do the things we don't have enough time for.
Which brings me to the question, did you make any writing resolutions back in
January? Did you pledge to write a page a day? 500 words a day? More
importantly, have you been successful? I've pondered that very subject with a
number of authors lately, and, like me, most of them were faithful to their
goals for about a week.
As honorable people, we make it a point to live up to
the promises we make to others. Commitments we make to ourselves, however, are
too easy to break, since no one's around to punish us. But don't we do just
that, with feelings of disappointment in ourselves, regret, and lost
opportunity? If we had started on that novel in January and kept at it for the
last 150 days, even a 500-word goal would mean 75,000 words under our belt
today.
To those authors who manage to write two or more books a year, I'm preaching to
the choir. I don't know how you do it, but I love you for being a source of hope
for the rest of us.
Stephen King says he writes 2,000 words a day. Julia Cameron shoots for
three pages, roughly 750 words. Your own mileage will vary, as it should, and
you might do well to start small. On those days when you surprise yourself
because you've written 3,000 words, you'll know you've gotten back your groove.
500 words a day is an easy task when you're having fun. As a
matter of fact, this blog post is exactly 500 words long.
As you
enthusiastically make your other plans for the summer, I encourage you to
include a recommitment to (or the initiation of) your writing resolution.
Remember how important writing is to you and how good it would feel to get your
book written by December 31st.
Then your resolution for 2024 could be all about
your next book.
