One Thousand Words

There is this one writing advice from the famous novelist Steven King which talks about how you should write a thousand words each day. Not even worry about quality, just go back to edit it later.

While I do not think I will ever write that much each and every single day, I figured I should at least have one blog-post where I fill that quota.

I am too nit-picky to write as much as that each day. I micro-manage and edit myself as I write, so stuff takes ages. As you hopefully are not noticing, just now I am not even looking at the screen to be able to do this.

There is also a problem with language for me. I am not at all bad in English, but it is still a second language to me. Every time I sit down to write, I always have to look something up.

You may think it is a bad idea for me to not just write in Norwegian, but I feel it would be stupid to limit my potential audience that much, so better to just struggle a little extra to reach more people.

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Just had a little break to make the image for this post. I tried to mimic Steven Kings book-covers. Hope it comes across. I just grabbed a photo taken by the Hubble telescope, and made sure both the first and last letters in the words are capitalized.

 

At this point I am starting to have a little trouble (which is why I’m filling space by writing that I don’t know what to write about).

The middle of a story, and a blog-post or article, is often much harder to me. There is some endpoint where you know what you want to write, as there is probably a big fun crescendo. Maybe the endpoint is actually what I came up with in the beginning, and the rest is just set-up I use to justify that finale.

And starting the story may not be easy, setting up characters or the introduction to an article can be very hard, but at least that is stuff you know have to be there. With the start you have something to write no matter what, even if that can be extremely hard.

But the middle is harder. It has to be interesting, so the reader won’t stop reading. It has to move the work from the starting position to where you want it to end up. Beyond that, you could fill it with anything. That sounds good, but in some ways limitations are a blessing. Limitations are a guard rail, a trail to follow. If you can go anywhere, you are likely to go nowhere.

I’m not sure if I’m getting that concept across, or it may be so obvious to everyone that I might aswell not have bothered writing it. Oh well!

 

Oh good, I’m almost halfway there!

 

I’m starting to think that this might not be all that hard to pull of. Granted this is just random ramblings, and not an actual fictional story. It may also have started to give me some troubles if I where to do this tomorrow aswell, as I could not use up so many words as I have now done by simply writing about the concept of this post.

But I think that if I did not have another day-job I have to spend time on, writing 1000 words each day would be no problem at all. But that is easy to claim when I don’t have to back the statement up with actual action.

 

Do I count the title? No, right? I’m thinking “no”.

 

I guess I should confess that I have actually never read a Steven King book in my life, up to this point.

I have seen so many of the TV-shows and movies (and probably read a great many books) that have been inspired by his work, but I have never actually read one of his stories.

That probably makes me a bad human in some ways. I think I will put IT and/or The Shining on top of my “reading-list”. I just have to finish the Dark Souls inspired comedy-book Souls of Darkness by Gary Butterfield, and then I can get to them.

It is a “reading-list” in quotes, as I will most likely get an audio-book. Most my “Reading” is audio now, as I don’t spare much time to actually sitting Down With a book.

With audio, I can “read” far more books than I would ever be able to without. I just put it on while I work, so I can get some intellectual stimuli while doing the same types of tasks over and over again.

 

Just went back to edit what I have already written. Pretty sure this PC capitalizes the first letter of random Words (it just now happened With “Words”, and “With”), it is super annoying.

It also turns “go” into “og”. “Og” is the Norwegian word for “and”, so at least I get why the PC does that.

I also had to look up the Word (again!) capitalize. As I said, I have to look something like that up each time I write.

 

This may not have been my best blog-post ever, but I don’t think that is the goal of this.

The idea is more about actually getting words written down, damn quality or any other factors stopping you from writing stuff.

I absolutely understand if people did not bother to read all of this. And if you did, thank you! You are probably more patient than I would have been if I saw this on someone else’s blog.

Please comment if you actually read it, as I doubt anyone actually will 😛

 

I’m sorry for all this rambling.

I promise my next post will be no longer than 10 Words (damn it).

I’ll even throw in a cute animal picture or something, just as a thank you for sticking with me for this 😉