Follow along!

This story was born on a random day sometime in November when I was growing restless from not having created anything substantial in a while.

I was consistently writing 3–5 page short screenplay sketches, but they weren’t scratching the long-form itch. And working at a production company, it felt nearly impossible to put together more film projects on my days off, especially without much of a local network.

I knew from college that I could write a complete screenplay. But I had always found the process frustrating. We were taught and graded on first writing a logline, then a paragraph, then an outline, then a treatment, then character questionnaires, then beat sheets, and finally, three semesters later, we were allowed to write pages.

The problem was that, by the time I got to those pages, I still didn’t know my characters because I hadn’t lived in my story, I’d just been giving myself cliff notes of what needed to happen, but none of it rang true.

That was probably why I could write a 3–5 page sketch but couldn't sustain something longer. Without knowing the characters driving the action, I couldn't keep the story moving. But to get to know the characters, I needed a longer work that could give them room to exist.

So, on a whim, I switched media and began exploring a new world. It was exciting at first. Then I took a few months off at 7,000 words. I came back to it, got to 17,000, and life got busy again.

When I came back after that, though, I had accumulated enough experience facing what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance that I decided to make the daily goal almost laughably small: 300 words a day, or about 15 minutes. That was when the story really began to take off.

I had always assumed that, to be a "real" writer, I was supposed to suffer. I thought the pain and difficulty of writing were part of what gave the work merit. I suffered in school writing those drab screenplays, so those were more important than this obviously. But what I found was that writing this book had been surprisingly pleasurable throughout the entire process.

Three hundred words was just long enough to get me over the last hump. I could sit down and write 250 without much trouble, then highlight the new section to check the word count and come up short.

Only 50 more words. I could do that.

And that extra little burst would usually carry me past the goal by another 100 words—or sometimes another 1,000.

One of the most exciting discoveries came from experimenting with weekends. During the week, my only real goal was to keep the manuscript alive with those 300 words. On weekends, though, I had more time, so I started experimenting with how much longer I could sustain a session.

Eventually I tried something that continued to work: sit at my desk, read a chapter of a different book, write 300 words, and repeat.

My hypothesis was that if writing 300 words in one sitting was about the limit of what I could sustain before getting frustrated, I could refill my creative cup between micro-sessions and keep going.

And it worked. The first time I tried it, I completed four micro-sessions totaling just over 1,300 words. It felt like a breakthrough.

That has probably been the most exciting part of writing this book so far: discovering a process that actually seems to work for me.

I'm not a professional novelist, and I'm certainly not writing at a professional novelist's pace. I'm an amateur, and I'm happy to stay one if it means I can keep the routine that has allowed me to actually write.

But, as Pressfield might agree, if the routine makes me show up and write every day, maybe I've managed to "turn pro" in the most amateur way possible.