1,000 Words

It’s 10:29 PM and this is writing is an exercise to see what 1,000 words feel like writing. I’m writing this to clear a mindset of chronic procrastination on this blog. I normally start writing, and eventually, somewhere in the middle of the writing, I give up.

That’s because there’s no focus. No direction and I’m not really saying anything. I may start off with great intentions, to write about, say, technology. But then I deviate into education, and I decide I need a diagram and then something else to explain that, perhaps a diagram, and on and on. About thirty minutes into the thesis, I simply save the draft, with good intentions. The good intentions to come back to it.

I’m writing this in Microsoft Word and already I feel as though this is an achievable goal. Word’s tracking my progress and so far, I’ve done 135 words. Not too shabby, that’s a little over 10% of the work done.
And it’s only two minutes into the writing. So, it means that I can write all of this in 20 minutes – if I’m rambling on like I am now.

In real writing though, I’d have an outline, and I’d stick to the bullets that I write. But I’d be conscious of the craft of limiting the words to a fixed number and not so open-ended like I normally do. Without a target.

This writing also doesn’t have a content target, it’s not like I’m writing to say anything, other than to get to the other side of 1,000 words and see what that feels like. And I have just passed 262 words, so officially 25% of the writing would be done. For a blog that’s not serious, it means that I can write an article and post it daily.

This test comes off the Morning Pages that I do diligently every morning without fail. Even when I have a morning appointment, I make sure that I sit down for the 30 or so minutes it takes to get the Morning Pages done.

So, if the Morning Pages are so disciplined, why is the blog so difficult to write?

It’s not that I don’t have the topics to write about. I have a ton of ideas and the way the process works shows. I will start writing in earnest and then somewhere veer off on a tangent. The tangent will get me lost in the spaghetti world of nonsense at which point I’ll see that I’ve lost interest in the article I was writing.

Not that I write for myself, I try my best to think of something that I think would be interesting to share. For example, in 2023, I started on the extreme Keto diet – so, so close to carnivore. For a while it was very carnivorish and then I added non-starchy vegetables. I was very worried about the health effects it would have from the loss of some vitamins, especially stuff like vitamin C which is in short supply in meats. And I found out that meat has just enough vitamin C if you’re not eating starches – glucose.

I did a number of articles in that vein and discovered that since the articles were exploratory, they were easier to write. I was thinking along.

The Morning Pages are like that. The unstructured method and the lack of focus on content makes the writing flow. I don’t worry about what I’m saying, I just write. And since this exercise is simply an exercise to get to the end of 1,000 words, I am finding the same rhythm has set. Writing about the act of writing, and then expressing some thoughts on diet while thinking of what I’m actually doing. I have now passed 615 words so I’m well past the halfway mark and on to the zone marathon runners call The Wall. 

When energy drains from the exertion and the glucose levels are low. At this point in a marathon run, you feel like you should walk for a while.

And so it is with my regular writing, this is the point at which I cannot see the end and so I put away the computer and do something else. However, in this case, I know that the end is near, it’s about 300 words near. And that I can do. No matter what I write about, I know that the end is coming and I can publish.
If I’d learned to treat writing as a structured process and not think of it as a creative journey, with no goal and I should try to keep walking until the Muse shows up, then I would have had a better time with the blog. It was however a really long time to see that the business of writing is a business and if I want to get to the finish line of something, I must not only have content goals (which are good) but I must also have a target in terms of the time I will take to write and, in the case of writing, the number of words that I want to write.

Content can be king but it’s an elusive and hazy, foggy, murky companion. A review, for example, of a product that I like can be done in 300 words, if I choose it to be 300 words. Or it can run until I think I’ve said all I have to say about the product. If I choose the 300 word review, then it seems to get done well and quickly. If I just sit down and write about this product that I think I like, the review is never published since I’m never sure that I have covered everything I want to cover.

The goal of this exercise was to write till I get to 1,000 words and see if that length is a comfortable length for a blog article – one per day. It’s now 10:47 PM, so it took about 30 minutes to get to the end of this article. And I must say I think that 1,000 words may be the sweet spot.

THE END (1,027 words)