1,000 days and Counting: Don't Break the Chain!

A couple of months ago I hit a major milestone in my writing life: I hit my one-thousandth day in a row of writing. I've written before about the Magic Spreadsheet, back when I first started using it in 2013, and later that same year when I was clocking along at 500 words a day. Now that I'm more than 1,000 days and 1,000,000 words in, it seems like a good time to think about this tool and how/why it works so well for me.

In the history of my writing life, starting when I was a child and continuing until I was 42 years old, I started hundreds of projects and never finished a one. I'd write until I hit something that stopped me (either within the story, or in my life)…then I'd stop. When I came back, I always started something new.

That's fine, if you want to write just for the enjoyment of writing. But I wanted to *be* a writer, with books for sale in bookstores. Maybe even make my living at it someday. You can't do that on unfinished work.

People are motivated by different things. I honestly didn't expect the Magic Spreadsheet to be as effective for me as it has been. After all, I've tried point systems and gamifications of various sorts for other aspects of my life (exercise, chores, etc.) and it only works for a little while. They usually feel artificial and constricting to me--but this one was different.

I don't really care about my number of points or my rankings against other writers that much (Okay, maybe I do check to make sure that I'm ahead of Chad in points, since he'll always be ahead of me on number of days).

But I have a chain--a chain of 1,066 days as I write this. And it's maintaining that chain that has me writing every day, even when life is busy and even when I feel terrible, even when the children are sick and the Internet is down, even when I'm on vacation or have to do my writing on the mom couch at lessons. The longer the chain of days written in a row grows, the less likely it becomes that I will break it. I'll cut myself the slack to make a weaker link on some days (only writing 250 words, the minimum), but mostly I write somewhere between 800 and 4,000 words a day now, and that adds up fast.

Now, that explains why I write every day, but not why it helped me finish things. That, I think is physics: momentum in particular. Momentum fed by sheer stubbornness.

If I'm not allowed to drop a project (because that would break the chain!), then I have to find a way to move forward in it, thinking my way out of corners I'd trapped myself in, digging my way out of holes I'd fallen into. I have to find a way or I'll break the chain, you see.

It's been freeing in my writing process, too because I'll let myself write something I'm not sure is going to be right. Wanting to get it "right" was part of what would stop me in the past--I wouldn't write it until I was sure I knew where it was going. Now, I'll write a scene three different ways to see which is better. They all go into the word count, and I'll choose the right one (or combine them, or scrap them all and try again) in the final version. Once I got to "the end" for the first time, I was able to trust in the process in a way I never had before.

So, how about you? What works for you to keep moving forward when you hit blocks in your endeavors? Does tracking help? Or does it make you feel trapped? Would love to hear your stories in the comments.