15 minutes/day = writing career

Happy Friday!

I love it when Dean Wesley Smith talks math. I dislike math in general, but he always paints such a beautiful, achievable picture with his numbers. A fantasy in which I (and you!) can have a writing career by spending at least 15 minutes a day hardcore writing. A fantasy that, actually, could easily be reality:

If you type 250 words in 15 minutes, and considered your writing important enough to type for 15 minutes every day, you will finish 91,250 words in one year. Or about one longish novel. (Sorry, but it’s true. 250 words x 365 days = 91,250 words. By the way, I passed 250 words in this article somewhere in the middle of the paragraph about Kris above.)

Note that if you type for 15 minutes every day and produce 250 words and work only on short fiction, by the end of a year you would have completed about 18 short stories of average length of 5,000 words.

If you work for one really, really tough hour of writing (snicker) five days per week, and take two weeks off from the really rough pace (more snickers), you will produce (1,000 words x 5 days x 50 weeks =) 250,000 words in one year. Or about three novels.

Or about 50 short stories (at average length of 5,000 words).

That’s right. 250,000 words in a year. Working one hour per day and taking the weekends off and two weeks vacation.

So to make a living writing short fiction, you need a work ethic that will drag you to the computer at least one hour per day, five days per week. I know that’s tough. But if everyone could do it, there would be a lot of writers making a living with their fiction.

Read the whole thing here!

So put into this context, Sunday's 300 words should take you something like 20 minutes. That's not even a whole lunch break!

You could do it right now and then you would be done for the whole week. Utterly free to enjoy your weekend. Mmm.