Sprint Plus One

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For two years now, I've been trying to sprint with Ramona each day. It's been a fabulous addition to my writing life, with the unexpected benefit of nurturing connections with other writers who are doing the same, and the very much anticipated benefit of squeezing more writing into a full schedule.

My sprints aren't as dedicated as Ramona's -- I'm not a morning person, so the early birds who sprint at 7AM have finished their sprints before I've even started mine. But, I check in late, after I've finished my hour, happy to be part of the group, and motivated by the thread that I know is there even if I haven't yet arrived.

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In addition, I'm more loyal in the summer. During the school year, sprints sometimes get edged out by class planning and teaching, both of which require a portion of the same creative energy that I give to my writing. I'm working on finding my balance, but some days the sprints win and other days, it's the classroom stuff.

After spending the weekend at Pennwriters and being reminded that other writers clock their progress, so to speak, in terms of words, not time, I decided that maybe I needed to update my plan. I love my sprints and the sprint crew, so I'm not ready to jump ship.

Still, there are days that I write, but don't "count" my writing as a sprint because of the way I've defined the sprint itself. Blogs, for example, have never been a part of my sprint time, despite the fact that they make up a substantial chunk of my writing time.

After some deliberation, I've decided to combine my sprints with my previous word count system. I used to keep track of words written each day, but once I started sprinting, word counts fell by the wayside. Over at Organizing by STYLE, I'm constantly talking about celebrating small steps and tracking progress, no matter how small, yet, here at home, I was completely dismissing progress that occurred on an almost daily basis. Silly at best and self-defeating at worst, it constituted a flaw in my plan.

So, as so often happens after Pennwriters weekend, I have a new plan. Sprint? Absolutely. Word count? Yep, that too. After all, when a person writes five blogs a week, she ought to "count" them, right?

It's about time to practice what I preach.

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Anatomy of a Sprint

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One of the best things about the break between semesters is the opportunity to put my writing first. And, thanks to a great presentation by fellow writer Ramona DeFelice Long, one way that I do that is to make sure I get my writing sprints in. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know all about my writing sprints, so you understand that getting myself into the habit between semesters (when I have lots of one hour time slots at my disposal) makes it easier for me to maintain the habit once the semester begins.

For me, the ideal sprint remains the one Ramona taught me: one hour, first thing in the morning, before the day takes over, with a goal of writing 1000 new words. This is the gold standard, the one to which I aspire.

The reality, however, is somewhat different.

On a good day, my one hour sprint consists of sixty uninterrupted minutes sometime early in the day. Because I have a high school student living in my house, and because procrastination is part of my writing process anyway, these sixty minutes rarely occur right out of the gate. I usually putter for a bit, checking email and often writing and posting my blog before settling in for my sprint, which occurs anywhere between mid-morning and bedtime.

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Some days, I end up with a split sprint -- the first thirty minutes in the morning or early afternoon and the second thirty minutes in the late afternoon or evening. I try not to cut my sprint into more than 2 pieces, but some days, it happens.

Perhaps the most useful sprint variation I've stumbled across is the sprint as a means of digging into an unpalatable or overwhelming task. For me, that task is revising. I hate revising, but there's something about breaking revisions into one hour chunks that makes the process much less painful. By telling myself I have to revise for only an hour, I've already taken an insurmountable task (revising an entire novel!) and made it more approachable.

I rarely "cheat" and count writing I'd do anyway (blog posts, for example) as my sprint time. Regardless of how I do it, when I do it, or how many chunks I break it into, I think sprinting is meant to advance a work-in-progress.

What task do you want to tackle, but keep putting off? Could a sprint be the answer for you?

Hamstrung

Since the Pennwriters conference in May, I have been a faithful sprinter. I’ve missed a day here and there, but, most days, I’ve managed to carve out an hour a day for “new word creation” -- blogs, forward movement in both the sequel to my novel and articles I’m trying to create. 

I’ve discovered that sprints work great for first drafts, but I am struggling a little with ways to stay faithful to my sprint on days when other writing tasks -- most notably the dreaded revisions on a completed novel -- loom. The sprinting habit has been a valuable addition to my writing routine, and I’m afraid that if I let it fall away for more than a day or so -- even if I’m doing other worthwhile tasks -- that the habit will fade away and I will lose the momentum I’ve gained.

I’ve now reached the point where I need to find out how to balance my sprints with my other writing activities.

On paper, this is easy. The sprint takes up only an hour a day, leaving me 23 more hours. Subtract sleep, the household tasks I can’t avoid and the hours in which my brain is fried and tasks that require thinking and logic are simply impossible, and I’m down to about 12 or 13 hours. 

What on earth am I doing for 12 or 13 hours that makes it impossible for me to scale this mountain? Immediately, the self-flagellation begins. Twelve hours is a lot of time. I’d have to be lazy or completely disorganized to consistently piddle away Twelve. Whole. Hours.

Once I called a halt to the self-imposed lecture, I realized I needed to genuinely answer the question. What am I doing for all of those hours? Here’s what I came up with:

• taking care of the needs of a family member
• running errands
• spending time with friends
• networking/promoting my book
• planning classes
• teaching classes
• reading for enlightenment
• reading for fun
• generating new ideas
• running my Thirty-One business
• keeping in touch with family and friends via e-mail and phone calls
• watching TV 
• “relaxing” online

Turns out I’m not lazy or completely disorganized after all. In fact, it turns out that life consists of more than writing, and that the flip side of my professional life (teaching) demands a significant chunk of that time. 

When I teach writing classes to adults, “how do I find time to write?” is by far the most frequently asked question. Most of these adults have lists that look a lot like mine, and they have a lot less flexibility than I do. While I can choose when and where I complete the tasks that make up my professional day, most of them cannot. 

And so we must set reasonable expectations. While I can certainly work at stepping away from Facebook and the television set, most of the rest of that list is important to my personal or professional growth. If I’m realistic, I know it’s important not to lose sight of the big picture. I would never tell my students to shortchange their personal or professional growth for any single-minded pursuit -- not even writing.

From a practical perspective, failure to experience life will quickly result in my having nothing to write about. And from a personal perspective, nothing we write will ever be as important as the relationships we have with family and friends. 

Which brings me back to why I started this sprint gig in the first place. It was a way of making sure I got my hour in before all of those bulleted items began clamoring for their allotted share of my time. Within a month, I’d outgrown my narrow definition (and, I should stress, the narrowness of the definition was completely self-imposed) of what a sprint should look like. 

Now it’s time to figure out what it looks like in the real world. Would you be surprised if I told you I'm already working on some ideas?

More on that next week. Meanwhile, if you're a writer who sprints, I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments below. How do you make it work?

Word count: 1185 

(Ouch! Too much time lost to party planning and taking stock…)