It’s January. Did you make New Year’s Resolutions? After a Christmas Omicron outbreak in the family I’m especially sluggish: my New Year’s resolution is to make resolutions...eventually. But everything I want to do this year can be accomplished with the 15-minute rule.
When I was teaching dance I would always quote my students a study on workouts that concluded a 15-minute workout basically delivers 80% of the results of a 1-hour workout.
Anyone can do fifteen minutes, right? For eighty percent of the results? So why the hell not work out? Where do I sign?
And I think that’s a really important concept to grasp for ANYTHING we want to do.
So what are our typical resolutions?
- Work out more. Well, see above.
- How about learning a language, or improving a language you already have a foundation in? 15 minutes a day.
- Playing the piano or getting back to it? 15 minutes a day
- Writing a book? ABSOLUTELY.
I don’t think it’s said often enough that you CAN write a novel (or a script, or a TV pilot....) in whatever time you have. Even if that’s only fifteen minutes a day. If you have kids, if you have the day job from hell, if you are clinically depressed, if there’s a pandemic, if democracy seems to be crumbling around you— whatever is going on in your life, if you have fifteen minutes a day, as long as you write EVERY DAY, to the best of your ability, you can write a novel that way.
Fifteen minutes of writing a day for a year equals a book.
In fact, I wrote my first novel, The Harrowing, by writing just five minutes per day.
My day job was screenwriting, at the time, and yes, it was a writing job, but it had turned into the day job from hell. But fury is a wonderful motivator and at the end of the day, every day, I was so pissed off at the producers I was working for that I would make myself write five minutes a day on the novel EVERY NIGHT, just out of spite.
Okay, the trick to this is – if you write five minutes a day, or fifteen, you will write more than five or fifteen minutes a day, sometimes a whole hell of a lot more a day most days. But it’s the first five minutes that are the hardest.And that often ended up happening. Sometimes I was so tired that all I could manage was a sentence, but I would sit down at my desk and write that one sentence. But some days I’d tell myself all I needed to write was a sentence, and I’d end up writing three pages.
It’s just like the first five minutes of exercise, something I learned a long time ago. As long as I can drag myself to class (or now, to the living room) and endure that first five minutes of the workout, and I give myself permission to leave after five minutes if I want to, I will generally do the whole class, and usually end up loving it. (There are these wonderful things called endorphins, you see, and they kick in after a certain amount of exposure to pain...)
The trick to writing, and exercise, is—it’s STARTING that’s hard.
I have been writing professionally for . . . well, never mind how many years. But even after all those many years—every single day, I have to trick myself into writing. I will do anything—scrub toilets, clean the cat box, do my taxes, do my mother’s taxes_rather than sit down to write. It’s absurd. I mean, what’s so hard about writing, besides everything?
But I know this just like I know it about exercise. If you can just start, and commit to just that fifteen minutes, or even five, those five minutes will turn into ten, and those ten minutes will turn into pages, and one page a day for a year is a book.
Think about it.
Or better yet, write for five minutes, or fifteen, right now.
It’s the New Year. Write a book.
Happy 2022, everyone!
- Alex
I am reading/listening to Cold Moon the third of your huntress Moon series. You understand characterisation and the deeper psyche so well. I’m jealous and in awe. You also carry plot so well the story line meshes and I can imagine the scenes. I will be downloading and listening to the rest of the series. Thank you for writing these.