Day 118: Building writing stamina; writing faster

Since I have abandoned my experiment into getting myself into creative flow, I decided to pursue another aspect of my productivity that I've been wanting to improve--the duration of time that I spend working each day.

Writing stamina is something you have to build up to. While it may not seem really strenuous to spend 6-8 hours sitting and writing, it's actually pretty mentally taxing.

When I was working full-time in biology and writing on the side, I only had 2-3 hours each night to write, so it was easy to work since I couldn't write for more than 3 hours.

But when I started writing full-time, and I had all day to write, I found it really difficult to write for more than 3 hours at a time. This was really frustrating, but if you think about it, it's not surprising. Someone used to only running 30 minutes can't suddenly jump up and run a marathon. You need to train for the longer distance.

When I first started this daily writing blog on the first of June, I'd been kind of lazy and hadn't been writing as many hours a day as I should have. It was one of the main reasons why I started the writing blog, to make myself accountable and not waste so much time during the day. The writing blog also made me realize where I was wasting time so I could reduce my non-writing tasks each day and have more time for writing.

Looking back at my writing blog, I was able to spend longer hours each day when I was doing the plotting of this series. I guess that's just easier for me to focus on. It's a lot of fun, and maybe because I don't have to focus on word count, it's a little less stressful than writing the rough draft.

When I started writing the rough draft, my hours of writing each day went way down. I'm not entirely sure why I have more trouble focusing when I'm writing as opposed to plotting, but I think the writing involves more mental energy.

So I think I'll just approach this like someone training for a marathon. I'll have to work on increasing the number of hours I work per day slowly to build my physical and mental stamina.

My hours of work per day has been adversely affected by my ongoing health issues, so I'm not entirely sure how successful I'll be in my stamina training. But I have to at least give it a shot!

I have to do mostly blocking today since I haven’t blocked out the next several scenes. I’m almost done with the book, though! I’m not certain how much I’ll be able to work on the rough draft writing today, but I’ve been counting blocking in my “writing” time since it pertains directly to my rough draft.

***

Today I tried to pay more attention to what I did all day, especially when I took breaks. I have been using Day One as an electronic bullet journal for various things, but one of the journals is for my eating (because of my IBS). Today I used that journal not only for my eating but also to record what I did during the day so I would know where exactly I was spending my time, and where I might be wasting it.

I wanted to try to figure out where my day was going so that I could instead work on putting in more hours writing.

Some time was spent on house chores, as I expected. (I've had to cook more often than I did before because of the IBS, and I've been baking more also since sourdough is one of the carbs my intestines can tolerate without problems.) But today I also noticed that I spent too long on social media.

I know I don't usually do this, because I've seen my record of how long I spend on social media other days. But today I was interested in a particular writing thread in one of my writing groups, so I would check Facebook during my breaks. I usually only check Facebook once a day, so this was unusual and it also wasted time.

I suppose I had thought I was immune to the lure of social media, since I'm usually pretty good about limiting myself to once a day, but as they say, pride goeth before a fall! I have to be wary of that from now on.

One neat thing I discovered today by accident was that if I do monsters on 4thewords.com that have a shorter time limit, I tend to write faster. My writing pace for these types of monsters was almost 1700 words per hour because I wanted to make sure I could beat them, and I couldn't take my time since the time limit was shorter.

When I have 2 hours to write 1000 words, I don't feel a time pressure and can lollygag around, but today when I had to write 150 words in 10 minutes, I found myself focusing and not wasting so much time. I had several of those monsters in a row, and so I did a fast, focused sprint.

It reminded me of the Endurance monsters on 4thewords, which are time sprints rather than monsters with a word count goal. The Endurance monsters are actually not difficult--I was able to keep typing at a pretty slow pace and still beat the Endurance monster. But if I write faster, I get bonuses on drop items, so it's incentive to write faster.

So this might be a way for me to increase my writing pace, by making sure I have some of these monsters with a more difficult time requirement or some Endurance monsters.

Today I was able to spend more time writing than I did yesterday, but my IBS was also not as bad today as yesterday. Still, I'm building up my writing stamina! I hope I can continue this!

Blocking: Time spent: 4 hour 31 minutes
Writing: Time spent: 14 minutes
Writing: Total number of words: 393 words
Writing: Average speed: 1684 words per hour
Time spent doing other writing-related business: 2 hours, 44 minutes

My takeaway for today: Monsters with more difficult time limits or Endurance monsters seem to force me to write faster.

My second takeaway for today: Watch out for wasting time on social media! You are not immune, you dummy!

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