WRITER’S CHOPS

by Steven Steinbock

I’ve spent the summer building up my writing chops: the muscles required to squeeze creative juice out of the brain, through the fingers, and onto the keys. I’ve been a professional writer for more than a decade and a half, but I’ve never had terribly good writing habits. Driven by deadlines, I write when I have to. It’s easy to find the motivation when I know the check is coming. It’s worked for me. I’m not complaining.

But working on fiction is different. The motivation is more elusive when there’s no guarantee a story will sell, let alone read by anyone but me. It’s also less threatening for me to write about something or someone real. Fiction is stuff cut from the whole cloth; and the whole cloth comes wholly from me.

I’ve been working on a novel since April, a fact that I’ve kept close to the chest. I haven’t kept it a secret; it’s been alluded to in various Bandersnatches. But, perhaps because fiction writing is so risky, and because a novel constitutes a bigger risk than a short story, I haven’t wanted to put it out there.

This past spring, I did some plotting and planning, and a tiny bit of writing. By mid-June, I had written about 10,000 words (which amounts to an average of two paragraphs a day). Nothing to write home about.

I needed to develop some better working habits and build up my writing muscles.

James Scott Bell wrote somewhere about a habit of his — a habit he might have read about somewhere else. He called it the Nifty Three-Fifty or the Thrifty Three-Fifty, or some such Three-Fifty. He would start each day with a cup of coffee and a commitment that he would write 350 words before going on to anything else. I may be missing the fine points but that was the gist of it.

I could do that. It’s like doing a set of ten push-ups. I could stretch out in front of the laptop and hammer out 350 words no problem.

So I did.

The idea behind James Scott Bell’s Nifty Three-Fifty was that 350 words was a daily starting point. But I began the summer using it as daily goal. And it worked. I reached the goal each day. (Except June 30. Don’t know why, but my output that say was zero). The 350 couldn’t be just any words. Email words didn’t count. Criminal Brief columns didn’t count. The 350 words had to be new words applied to the word count of my novel manuscript.

I sometimes sat in front of the keyboard and didn’t know what would happen next. I’d stare at the screen and feel crummy. I’d get up and walk around the block and sit down again and stare some more. Eventually I got my 350.

In fact, on most days I got well beyond 350. In fact, during the first month (including June 30), my average was closer to 650.

So I boosted my daily goal to 500 words.

After two weeks, I found that my daily average was just over 700 words. So I set 800 as my new goal. It was like increasing my push-up reps. I was gaining writer’s strength.

PHYSICAL THERAPY FOR WRITERS?

What has surprised me the most about this process of writing is how much it has physically affected me. The creativity part has been wonderful. Ideas have been flowing like milk and honey. But my fingers and arms have turned to rubber.

The pads of my fingertips have become really tender. The tendons running up my forearms and through my hands, particularly the first and second digits, have been sore. I’ve iced them, rested them, flexed them, and massaged them.

Maybe it’s a product of age combined with the fact that my fingers have been especially active. I’d love to relieve it. If anyone has any suggestions, or suffers similar conditions, this is the place to talk about it.

Meanwhile, I need to put my fingers on ice.