250. One page. 250 words in 12 point font, double spaced, auto indent paragraphs with no line or space added between paragraphs (which I hate by the way, why does MS Word default to this stupid setting?). One page times 5 days a week times 52 weeks equals 260. Take off for vacations, busy deadlines, weddings, funerals, or graduations and at the end of a year the quota could still be held at 230 pages times 250 words will get you novel that comes in at less than 60,000 words. Not quite enough for a full length novel.
This is not how I write novels. I don’t have the drive to write one page a day. I want to write five pages a day. I often do when I get into a story. So, why don’t I have a bookshelf full of completed novels? Because for a long time, I did not set writing quotas and as a student, I didn’t do much writing outside of schoolwork.
In the article, How to Set and Reach a Writing Quota Yahoo contributor, Wanda Leibowitz writes “There are two basic ways to set your writing quota: by process, or by product. Setting a writing quota by process means pledging to log a certain number of minutes or hours, and setting a writing quota by product means promising to output a certain number of articles, stories, chapters, poems, lines, or even words.”
I am returning from vacation which was preceded by a harrowing week of rewrites for my capstone project: What Makes a Writer a Writer, now filed at DU as a complete and done deal. I will never have to write another word on that particular project. To write it I was working against a quota set by product with a deadline of August 11, 2011. I graduated on August 12, 2011 determined not to have to still do any school work once I walked across that stage and accepted the diploma (holder).
Anyway, the project was sixty-two pages counting front and back matter, between August 6th, 2011 and August 11, 2011. I rewrote, edited, fixed, almost every sentence in the paper and I had to add crucial material to two sections and re-organize two others. In order to get this accomplished I could not think about writing for a certain number of hours or minutes. I edited and wrote to exhaustion, napped or slept, woke up and did it again.
Needless to say, I crashed afterword. I napped and slept my way through August 13, 14, 15, and 16. I am still in down mode. I don’t plan to set any quotas until August 22nd. Then it is game on! I have two projects, one a non-fiction and one a fiction, that I am determined to finish by the end of the month. I will begin to meet these goals by setting my writing schedule – my quota using the process of writing for an “X” number of hours a day.
What process works for you?
Writer by Writing 