Four words

The old adage is that a writer should write at least four pages a day.

Not an average of four pages a day.  At least four pages a day.

Why?  It's all about building discipline.  About making writing a habit.  Forcing yourself to sit on your butt and actually write - not just doing it whenever the moon is right, and the auguries are good.

And yet, it's nonsense.

I don't mean it's bad advice.  Not really.  But it doesn't work for me.

Why not?  Besides the vagueness of the amount (four of what kind of pages?  At what font size?  Double spaced?) I frankly don't think it's any kind of great investment of my time to pound out four pages of absolute crap that I will just delete the next day to rewrite,  There are better things I could be doing with my time.

Like outlining.  I'm not a seat-of-the-pants kinda guy.  I (generally) outline a story to absolute death before I even put pen to (virtual) paper.  (Seriously, in the past I've hunted through sheaves of notes finding where I had which scraps of dialogue scribbled down, as the entire section of banter was pre-written over months of development, and over many separate pieces of scrap paper.)

So here's my compromise:  four words per day.

Yeah, I know.  But for me, just opening Microsoft Word and getting something down is discipline enough, for now.  Even if the last thing I want to do is write, I'm trying to force myself to at least open the program and bash out my four words.

Cause you know what?  Sometimes four words lead to forty.  And sometimes those forty lead to four hundred.  And once in a while, when everything aligns, those four hundred lead to four thousand.

And it never would have happened if I hadn't written those four short words - whatever they are.

If I don't have my next novella (or, soon, novel) ready to begin, then I will start (or continue) a short story.  As long as I am writing something.

At least four words of something.