[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6]

Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 8 minutes.

I’m going to write about bullshit today, and apologies ahead of time to those who are sensitive to base language, but I’m actually intending a very specific usage of the term. In On Bullshit, the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt identifies different groups of people relative to their orientation to the truth when communicating with others. Both honest and dishonest people care about the truth – they are just oriented on opposite sides of it. Bullshitters, however, don’t care if what they say is true or not – they only care if what they are saying is persuasive to their audience. They’ll say whatever they need to (might be true, might not) if it gets them the desired outcome.

Many people other than con men and hucksters try to get away with bullshit. Friends, family – ourselves if we are being honest (wink) – we’ve all tried to convince people of something, whether a big deal or something trivial, regardless of the truth. But because we all hate being bullshitted by someone else (it feels like such a violation of trust!), human beings have evolved a pretty finely tuned sense of when someone is bullshitting us.

Why am I bringing all of this up? Because writing is communicating, so writers need to seriously consider bullshit. Because generally, writers want their stories to “ring true” with audiences. Because convenient plot devices that wrap up the story nicely but don’t fit with the characters or reality you’ve written are bullshit. Because forcing a character to make decisions that go against the characterization you’ve given them just to arrive at some event you want to write about is bullshit.

And readers are better at spotting this bullshit than you think (after all, you’re good at it, aren’t you?), and they generally don’t like it. Be careful how you write, because you might be undermining your own goals of connecting meaningfully with the reader.

Or, if you’re going to bullshit anyway, get really good at it.

The Darn Ecologist

[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5]

Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

There’s no shortage of books on “the craft of writing”. Today I’d like to take a position that often doesn’t show up in these books: It’s not the craft of writing, it’s the crafts of writing. Because as far as I can tell, there are two distinct skill sets (at least, maybe more!) that every aspiring writer must develop to reach full potential, and they have an interesting relationship to each other.

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[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4]

Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 57 minutes.

I’ll admit it: I don’t understand the apparent fascination among the online writing community with daily tracking of the number of words written. I’m personally going for time spent writing during this challenge and not words written, for the following reason: the disincentive to revising.

From the nonfiction writing that I have done for my career, I’ve learned – quite painfully I might add – that revising is 1) absolutely necessary, and 2) ends up taking much more time than the initial drafting where you are laying down fresh words and blazing a trail. In other words, most of my time spent writing over the full course of a manuscript is actually time spent revising. And by using word count as my metric of success, I would be punishing myself for the hallmarks of good revising: the replacement of unnecessary modifiers, the removal of irrelevant digressions, the consolidation of redundancies.

More philosophically (warning: commence eye-rolling now), an emphasis on word count is an emphasis on a superficial quantity, on a result that I can’t imagine that readers really delight in. Oh! The novel is over 500 pages of drivel? Hooray! Yippee! Don’t readers actually delight in the quality of writing, not its quantity? Would you rather read 100 pages of meh that has been checked for typos once, or 10 pages of revelatory and deeply resonant prose that required ten intense revisions? All I’m saying is that writing is a messy, tortuous, uncompromising process full of false starts and dead ends, and – for me – becoming a writer means taking the time to fully embrace that process, regardless of how slow it is.

[Side note: Yes, it took me an hour to revise the paltry 300 words written above. Yes, it’s still not that great – you should have seen how ragged it was before revising! Also, did you know that WordPress’s spellchecker can’t recognize “revelatory”? Get a better dictionary, WordPress, the red underlining is undermining my confidence.]

Of course, I’m not “the-God-of-writing-who-must-be-obeyed”. This is just what makes sense to me. Figure out what works for you and do that. If that means daily word counts, so be it.

The Darn Ecologist

[Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3]

Yesterday I wrote for 2 hours and 36 minutes.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Who cares! We’re here to talk about writing. But let’s rephrase that:

If a writer finishes a manuscript and no one is around to read it, does it matter?

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[Previously: Day 1, Day 2]

Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 2 minutes.

On Day 2, I listed the 15 story prompts that I’ll be using for this challenge. I created them using a technique that I learned about in one of John Dufresne’s books on writing, either Is Life Like This? or The Lie That Tells a Truth (can’t remember!), called the Plot-o-Matic. It’s a pretty straightforward way to get story ideas rolling. It goes like this:

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[Previously: Day 1]

Yesterday I wrote for 3 hours and 15 minutes.

Here are the 15 prompts that I’ll be using during this challenge.

Read More »

Today I am starting a 30 day writing challenge.

Details

Who? Yours truly, The Darn Ecologist

What? A challenge to see if I can consistently write a few hours on a daily basis for a month. In other words, like it’s my job. First drafts, subsequent drafts, editing, outlining, etc. – all are fair game in this challenge. The point is how much time am I working on my writing.

When? Starting right now and continuing for the next 30 days.

Where? Progress updates to be posted here on the regular, to keep myself accountable – or to indicate my shame. Let’s double down: these updates won’t count towards my daily writing. That should keep them short and to the point!

Why? Simply put, it’s a test of determination. I’ve been batting around the idea of becoming a writer for around a year now; I’ve read dozens of books on writing; I’ve got the technical skills to do it; I’ve got the time (this is a biggie!). The only thing that stands in my way is whether I am disciplined to actually… you know… write on a daily basis. This challenge is to see if I can will myself into ignoring all the other distractions in the world and just do the work.

How? I’ve written a decent amount of nonfiction as part of my career. Now I’d like to focus on fiction, which I’ve never done before. I plan on writing some short stories to begin. I’ve got a list of 15 story prompts (more on how I generated those later). That should definitely keep me busy for 30 days.

Follow along to watch me fail, watch me succeed, cheer me along, or stick it to me when I stumble.

Here we go!

The Darn Ecologist