The remarkably talented and kind Cathy Day was nice enough to share this. Funny how we always try to complicate things when really the simple method is usually the best one...
Just Show Up
I have a challenge for you. Write 100 pages this summer, which is roughly 500 words a day. A page and a half a day. Starting now.
Let me tell you story: For a long time, I was like you (probably). I only wrote when I was assigned to write, when my turn being “up” in workshop loomed. First in college, and then in graduate school, I followed the same “school” pattern: schoolwork and parties and recovery from said parties on the weekends, visiting family and friends and working during the summers. Same old same old. I was 25 years old, three years into an MFA program, and I still acted (without really realizing it) as if writing was something I did “for school.”
And then one fall, the buzz among all the fiction writers in my program was that Inman Majors—by the way, that’s Majors as in Johnny Majors, his uncle, Pitt football fans, but I digress---yes, Inman had returned from summer break with a 200-page manuscript, a rough draft of a novel. Of course, we all hated him immediately. See, Inman was enrolled in the poetry track. A poet! had accomplished what we fiction writers were still struggling to do ourselves. The nerve of that guy.
I ran into Inman at a back-to-school party, and I asked him how he did it. He took a swig of beer and spoke the words I have been quoting ever since: “Well, I’ll tell you, Cathy. Every day I’d write two pages. And then I’d play golf. Then I went to work.” I felt like Moses at the Burning Bush, hearing the voice of God. Really? It was that simple? Well, of course it was that simple. And so the next summer, I tried it, and sure enough, by September, I’d accumulated about 150 pages or four stories, which eventually wound up in my MFA thesis and in my first book.
That’s when I became a writer. Sure, I’d wanted to be a writer since I was 12, but that long, hot summer of 1994 was the first time I felt like I was actually doing it, the first time I felt worthy of calling myself a writer, not a student of writing. You’ll notice that I still hadn’t published anything yet.
The most important thing I can tell you about being a writer is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to be one; you have to give yourself permission to be one.
Everybody’s regimen is different. I know writers who must write 1000 words a day, no matter what, or a page or two a day, no matter what. One of my friends keeps a pocket calendar, and for every day she produces 1000 words, she gives herself a sticker for that day; at the end of the month, she challenges herself to have more days with stickers than without. Maybe you think that sounds silly, but she wrote a whole book this way, and published it, and now she’s writing the second one. Another writer friend of mine, a retired professional, started a peer writing group (just four people). They met once a week. He did this so that he’d be accountable to someone besides himself—once a month.
A former student of mine started a blog, http://www.spinelesscompanion.com/ and he posts a draft of a poem every day. Writing a poem a day isn’t unusual. Many poets do this privately, but I think for my student, posting keeps him honest.
Another student of mine created a “process blog,” an online journal or “thinkspace” where she posted ideas and thoughts related to a project she was working on for a digital media theory class. Here’s her blog, http://anatomyofthesaints.blogspot.com/, and here’s the final product, http://www.bethsteidle.com/
Writers and artists have always written in journals and notebooks—they can be physical objects or digital ones. They can be completely private, like a diary you lock up tight, or partially transparent, an anonymous blog like Spineless Companion, perhaps, or completely transparent. For my next book, I’ve been doing some research on an artist named Gerald Murphy. He started with notebooks:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0AxZHWIQBLI/SOp_QPSEu9I/AAAAAAAABKg/SQKa4ouVcuQ/s400/still+notebooks.jpg
where he’d write gobbledy gook things like, “Picture: Nature morte cocktail tray, shaker, glasses, stemmed cherries inside lemon knife, corkscrew plate bottle red white black grey (cut by lemon yellow?)” and then he’d end up with this:
http://frontburner.dmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/murphy_cocktail1.jpg
Flannery O’Connor sat at her desk for three hours every day, even when Lupus medication laid her low (the meds caused baldness, and her hip bones melted away) because she said she didn’t want to miss any ideas that might arrive. Every day, she showed up. Sometimes that’s all it takes, folks. Just show up.
That’s what I’m asking you to do. Challenge yourself this summer to “show up,” every day or every week, to think about your Big Thing, to see what it’s like to make writing a part of your life, a part of who you are.
This challenge isn’t required, by the way. It’s entirely elective.
- Develop your own method to keep track—in terms of hours? pages? words?
- Decide how you will hold yourself accountable.
I started a group for our class only on Facebook, or you can start your own group with other members of the class, and/or with other people you convince to accept the challenge. You could create a blog specifically for this summer and invite others to do so. Or you could meet in a real setting. You could create a list of books you think you need to read for your Big Thing and read and write about them on GoodReads. Whatever. It’s up to you. It’s not up to me to motivate you. It’s up to you.
There you have it: 100 pages by the first day of class. Go.
Write hard,
Cathy Day
