Speaking of Treating Your Writing Like a Job

Last Saturday I told a roomful of people that they needed to start treating their personal creative writing as though it were paid professional writing. Because frankly, otherwise most of us writers tend to let our writing be treated as a hobby, which means we let work, family, friends, the overdue closet-cleaning, and our neighbor’s dog interrupt it.

Today I see that John Scalzi at Whatever has posted his method for doing exactly that. Now, Scalzi actually makes a living writing his creative pieces — he’s a sci-fi author and journalist. But still. It’s refreshing to see a writer taking his writing seriously enough to put down his foot and pull the plug on the Internet — and all his friends and family by extension — for a set number of hours each day.

His magic number is 2,000 words or noon, whichever comes first. My magic number is about the same, except I try for 1,000 words on top of the 2,000. The first 1,000 is my throat-clearing. I write whatever I need to do that day, my annoyances and fears, anything that’s rattling in my head that would otherwise block my focus on my writing. It helps to get the crud out of the way before I start a professional or creative project. Sometimes all I need is 300 words to do that; other days it runs close to 2,000. But it works. If you haven’t tried it, please do. Many writers swear by the same method.