New Year's Resolutions, 500 Words A Day, and Gary Shteyngart

 

500 Words A Day

Expectations can be a killer for writers as well as completely ungrounding. Where do you start? What are some realistic expectations? How much of this whole thing is luck? Well obviously we can only control so much of what happens outside of the page, but if we start there can set some solid goals.

I was skimming a social media site this week, rather than writing, and saw a close friend of mine was pondering how a particular great writer got to be who they are. To be a little clearer, he had a shower epiphany after wondering how Gary Shteyngart got to be the writer he is today. He came to the conclusion that Shteyngart got in his 500 words a day, every day.  Let’s call my friend Robert. Robert is an MFA student who started his tenure at my undergrad before I graduated there. Robert has just had several stories accepted by great journals (maybe evoking a little envy from me), and has started up his own online journal. He in short, has been getting his 500 words a day.

But what about being in a funk? What about being busy in the holidays? Well I can speak from my own experience, if I don’t get those consecutive days of writing in, I lose a little ground in my writing and narrative precision. It doesn't matter if I have to go to a writing exercise book or work on a piece for a deadline, I have to get that time and mental workout in.

Well okay, you have me, now what does this particular regimen get me? What kind of writing muscles will I be working with? Well if you run the numbers out, that’s 182,500 words, that’s over 600 pages of work. Now getting those in every single day with holidays, travel, work, school, family, and meetings can make you insane and your family upset, but say you get them in about five days a week—that’s 130,000 words, or about 400 to 450 pages depending your prose. Obviously we don’t use every word and page from a rough draft, and a lot of cutting takes place to get a piece tight, precise, and purposeful. But using half of these original pages after revisions still leaves a novel length or short story worth of work. And that’s every year!

Obviously this little post isn't about publishing—I’ll leave that for another one of our editors, but just in getting that amount of work out every year certainly puts you in a great place for sending pieces out and showing manuscripts to peers and editors. And as for the benefit to your writing? Well at the end of the year look back at the work you were writing when you were inconsistent, it should speak for itself about the importance of getting your 500 words a day.

That’s how Gary Shteyngart got to be Gary Shteyngart.   

-Bradley Cole