Six months ago yesterday, I started writing daily. Although in the beginning I sometimes fell short, I mostly kept my committment to writing at least 500 words a day. For the longest time, I posted what I wrote. Recently, because I wanted to focus on writing and not necessarily posting, I stopped sharing my daily writings but I have kept up the streak.
Last night, curious about how much I’ve done, I sat down and added it all up. I wanted to mark the milestone. Because I do my writing in Writer, a distraction-free online text editor, I didn’t have an easy way to add up the word count. I had to do it manually, which was a bit of a pain. Luckily I only have to do that part once because now it’s all in a tidy spreadsheet.
I have written, in 6 months of intentional, habitual practice, just over one hundred thousand words. In fact, yesterday I passed that mark; the total as of last night is 100,323 words.
I was proud, and it made me cry a bit. That’s a lot of words. 100,323 divided by 182 days means an average of about 551 words a day. That daily number is easy enough to reach; clearly I can do it because I have done it. But 100K? That feels like a stretch. But I have demonstrated that I can do that, too.
Not every daily piece of writing is good writing. And they are not all on the same topic. Each one is whatever I wanted to write at the moment I sat down. Some of it is garbage (by my personal standards) and some of it is good (also by my own internal measure) but all of it is mine.
Is it time to ask a new question? Build on my success? Perhaps, perhaps. The obvious next step would be, can I do my daily writing towards a goal other than word count? Could I tell one continuous narrative?
I don’t know. Can I?
I don’t know. Can you?