Yesterday was post number 800 here at Little Nuances. Like so many other posts here, it wasn’t especially long (344 words), but if you multiply it be 800, you come up with 275,200 words. In contrast, my non-fiction singles book was 45,000 words. So, I’ve written approximately six times more words here at Little Nuances than I did for that book.
When you first start a blog, you never think about how many posts you’ll write or how you’ll keep coming up with topics to write about. You just want to write about what you are passionate about. But if someone forced you to pick a number of posts or words you would write over the next few years, it would be overwhelming. You’d probably choose a number like 30 posts or 10,000 words and even those numbers seem high because they exceed what you can comprehend on any given day. But you don’t need to worry about all that.
Just write today. There’s power in that.
If you write 344 words today, and tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, you will have written 1,720 words or nearly 4% of a 45,000 word non-fiction book in just five days. Write 600 words a day for five days and you’ve written 6.7% of a 45,000 word non-fiction book. At that pace, you could write a first draft in 75 sittings. [Although, if you want to be published with a royalty publisher, I’d encourage you to write a book proposal and then have a contract in hand first, but that’s an issue I can help you with over at the A Write Start website.]
Maybe you aren’t trying to get a book published. Maybe you are trying to write your family history before it gets lost forever, but you don’t feel like you have the time. Or maybe you would like to start a blog, but you are afraid you’d never be able to fill it up with words. You have today and all you need to write is 344 words.
