Take the GaryOak Productivity Challenge! · 2:43am Jun 11th, 2019

NaNoWriMo ain't got nothing on this.

TL;DR: This is a writer's version of the "Couch to 5k" program that I discovered by accident, and ended up obliterating the NaNoWriMo challenge by doing it.

Just over five weeks ago, I underwent surgery. After having to endure an agonizing wait on the operating table, due to the oral surgeon having to attend to an emergency, I had an extremely smooth procedure and recovery. No dry socket, no abnormal levels of pain or swelling, and other than being forced to not eat popcorn for another 6-8 weeks, I'm back to normal. Well, aside from having to occasionally use my syringe to blast chunks of food out of my lower gums, but even that's an occasional thing now rather than after every meal.

So, what've I done in the meantime?

Prior to surgery, I finished the first draft of my Mother's Day story. After I had several recovery days and wasn't high as fuck from the codeine in my T3 pills, I revised the story with the help of generous prereaders, published it, and ended up winning the contest!

But, as I was editing, I started doing writing sprints. What are those, you ask? B_25 introduced them to me before I went in for the operation, and I ended up trying them on side projects. I did three per day, 20 minutes each. The goal is to write as much as you can, as fast as you can, quality be damned. It turns out I can churn out words at around 70-80% of my usual standard at around 1,500 words per hour. I highly recommend trying these once you've gotten a good grasp on writing, because once you're good, even 70% of your standard is still quite workable.

But that wasn't enough. I'd been lazy, struggling with game addiction among other things, and I'd made almost zero progress on The Big Project since last summer. I think I had around 136k words total before the fall, and I had 155k at most going into May. That's not good. I also learned that I'm very bad at wordcount goals. Whenever I'd try to hit a goal, I'd struggle to consistently produce 1,000 words a day, which is the "professional standard" (Stephen King writes 2,000). So, I decided to take a hybrid writing approach.

This brings us to The GaryOak Productivity Challenge. The challenge is as follows:

1) Write no less than 3 hours a day, and no more than 4 hours a day.
2) Write every single day, for 30 days, no exceptions.
3) Write at least 1,000 words of non-sprint words per day.
4) Ideally, do 1 hour of sprints, 2-3 hours of non-sprints, and balance "serious" and "fun" projects between them.

The goals are to build a consistent writing habit, produce more words, be able to handle more than one project at a time, and to build overall endurance.

I found that sprinting on side projects is actually a lot of fun. In order to write The Big Project, I need to get into a certain mindset. It's a long, serious story that is a serious workout for me in terms of vocabulary and prose, and I need to keep a lot of things in my head as well as reference things that happened 600 pages ago in order to maintain continuity. It's a labour of love, but it's work. Often, after I sprinted, I hardly felt like I actually wrote anything at all because I let myself be sloppy, and it's for a small project. Sprinting had a great side effect, too: It let me improve my overall speed. Remember, I am usually a notoriously slow writer.

What I ended up doing was, in addition to the sprints, I started with two 1-hour long sessions of "free writing" for my main project. I just wrote as much as I could, as close to my usual standard as I could (i.e. I had my brain on), then I took a break. When a side project I did ran out, I upped it to three 1-hour sessions to maintain my 3-4 hours a day. When I resumed sprinting, I kept the three sessions up. Here's a spreadsheet of my results:

In thirty days, I ended up writing 101,001 words, which is slightly more than double NaNoWriMo.

I highly encourage anyone who was either prolific once, but lost their spark, and those who want to write more to give this challenge a go. Do not compare your word count to mine. The challenge is time-based, not to hit an arbitrary word goal. Starting may be difficult, and it may also be worth writing one less hour than you're planning to for the first week, so you can warm yourself up. If you end up with 30k or 300k, but write 3-4 hours per day and not miss a day, then you've won. If you have too busy of a life to be able to devote that many hours, plus breaks, then write for fewer. Find a time that works for you. Above all, the purpose of this challenge is to write at a tenable pace. Being able to do an occasional 15k word marathon in a day does you no good if you're trying to consistently produce stories, or write a project the size of a Song of Ice and Fire novel.

Happy writing, and smell ya later!

Gary

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