It All Adds Up
People say that about loose change, ring pull collections, and passing minutes. But until you see that candy jar full of coins, or the stuffed Ziploc bag of ring pulls, or the wrinkles in the mirror, it’s hard to conceive how those little things can add up.
If you follow me on Twitter (click HERE if you don’t), you’ll know I’ve been participating in the #vss365 challenge. VSS365 stands for Very Short Story 365 days. Participants write a story (or perhaps multiple stories if inspiration strikes) every day using a prompt word provided by monthly volunteers. Those stories are supposed to be very short since they are to fit the limits of a Tweet, which is 280 characters. That works out to somewhere in the 40-50 word neighborhood. And you thought 100 word stories were tough!
Today is August 23, so we are 235 days into the challenge. That means I’ve written at least 235 of these stories (there were a couple of days when I wrote two). I have to admit, I haven’t done a whole lot of other fiction writing over the last few months. I’ve been catching up on some reading and some studying I’ve been meaning to get to. Even still, every day I’ve cranked out 40-50 words and posted them on Twitter.
As well as posting these stories on Twitter, I’ve been copying them to a Word doc in case I want to use any of them as the basis for a longer story. Every day, I’ve copy-pasted a new 40-50 word story to the document.
Right now, the document is about 64 pages long. My word count is over 11,000.
That’s 40-50 words a day. Imagine if I’d managed to write 100, or 200, or 500 words of a novel. I’d probably be into editing and revisions by now.
So take this as encouragement if you don’t feel like you’re able to do much writing every day. Trust me. It all adds up.
It does add up, Colin. It’s what keeps me going to be honest, because life gets in the way so often. If I can just do a little bit towards my writing career most days it doesn’t take too long before I start to feel like I am getting somewhere.