Wrote about 740 words in an hour. Handwritten. (Sometimes I handwrite, sometimes I type. Switching back and forth helps jog my Creative Voice. I let it decide which to do at any given moment.)

Not my highest word count in an hour, but I did have a brief stretch in the story where I haggled over word choice and phrasing. I try to not get bogged down in such things, but there are times when I really have a way I want something to sound, and my first few attempts aren’t quite getting the rhythm. So, I try out a few different options: moving words around, switching out phrases, writing sentences, scratching them out, then writing new ones, etc.

I told myself I wasn’t moving from my chair for one hour, and lo and behold, it worked. I sat in my chair for one hour and wrote a decent chunk of words. Now I am writing this blog post, so more words abound.

Today was a day off from teaching, so this one-hour, uninterrupted writing time is a bit of an experiment. I usually rush to write a few hundred words in the morning before work, but this is the first time in several weeks where I’ve had a quiet afternoon (no children at home), and I’ve been able to write. I wanted to see if I had the focus and stamina to sit and write for an hour without interruption, and the answer is yes. I can do it. I can probably take a ten-minute walking break and do it again for another hour. I can foresee myself doing this for three or four hours in a day, if I had such chunks of time. I might even try it later this afternoon, when the kids are home from school, to see if I can do it with a little bit of noise and distraction hovering around.

I can see myself doing this day in and day out. A day spent writing.

I can’t say I’ve cracked “writer’s block” or anything (hahaha, far from it!), but I will say that I’ve gotten better and better at finding strategies and methods to be more focused and confident. A few years ago, sitting and writing for two or three hours sounded good in theory, but I had a terrible time actually doing it. I would jump on the internet for “just a minute” and end up there for hours. I would tell myself to go down to my computer and write, but then a million other things would suddenly become extremely urgent, and I’d do all those other things instead of the one thing I told myself I wanted to do.

A few years ago, I worried that I simply wasn’t cut out to write professionally because I didn’t have the discipline or work ethic to make it happen. When I did have hours upon hours of time on my hands, I squandered it.

Today, in this butt-in-chair experiment, I’ve seen that I AM capable of blocking time for writing, doing the writing, and getting the writing done. And wanting to do more writing. Keeping the chain going.

I definitely need to replicate this experiment many more times before I can confidently say my work ethic has improved, but today was a good start. Today showed me I can do it if I want to.