How to Keep a Writing Log (and Why You Should)
A few minutes a day can make all the difference.
I’ve been keeping an online writing log. Yesterday was day sixty.
At first I thought — who would want to read this? I mean. It’s boring. How many days in a row can I write I worked on my edits?
(Sixty, by the way. And, spoiler alert, probably another ten or so before I’m done. After that there will be another sixty or ninety days of I worked on my first draft today.)
A lot of the time, when I write about writing fiction, I think about myself at age twenty or so. When I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t know how to make that happen.
I didn’t even now how to start learning how.
It all seemed so big. So hard. So impossible.
I often write for that girl. I try to offer her a way in. I write things that I wish I’d been able to read twenty-seven years ago. In a weird way, I try to be my own mentor.
Not because I think my twenty-year-old self is still around and needs one, but because I think it helps me focus what it is I want to teach, and how I can best manage it.
Back then I would have loved to read a boring daily work log from someone who was a full-time writer. I would have…
