web analytics

Changing my life with 1000 words a day

I was just reading this article over at Medium.com called How writing 1000 words a day changed my life, and it made me wonder if doing the same would change my own life. I can imagine how those changes might be worthwhile.

I tried something similar at the beginning of 2012. I started a new blog called Think Wisely (now gone), and my goal was to write a blog post a day on thinking wisely. I didn’t have any minimum word limits, I just had a post a day as my goal. I kept it up for about 4 months before I ran out of steam and couldn’t find anything more to write about. But that was relating to just a single topic.

One of the reasons I started this Alans Journey blog was to write about allthe different topics that interested me, instead of just one topic. (You can see the different topics via the menu up the top of the page.) I know a lot of people out there write what they think others want them to write, or what they think would help them make the most money. Some of them can be really good at that, but not me. If I’m not being authentic, or true to myself, then I’m absolutely not comfortable doing it.

I felt like it would be better for me to just write about my thoughts, feelings, opinions, observations and insights about whatever topic interested me at the time. I felt like it would be more comfortable for me.

And I was right. It was more comfortable, and it was more interesting for me. But it wasn’t a post a day. It was what I felt like writing about, when I felt like writing. But a thousand words a day, every day? That’s pretty huge.

Yes, I’m practicing! This particular post is going to be a thousand words, and will be about writing posts of a thousand words.

Writing a thousand words a day is going to be huge. Huger than huge. That’s 30,000 words a month. That could even become a book a month. And you know what? That’s exactly one of the reasons I’m interested in doing this exercise.

I’ve had a goal for a long time to be a writer. I blog, I write, I think about writing all the time, all with the purpose of moving me onwards to my goal of actually making some money from my writing, so that I can give up my ‘day job’ and focus on my writing job. I can do it, I know I can!

I also know that most of what I write is going to be absolute rubbish. That’s just the nature of things. But along the way, there’s going to be some absolute gems produced too. And a lot of what I write will inspire more writing, and the gems might inspire some books, and along the way I might even become somewhat popular.

That’s important to me, because I won’t get any income from this until I become popular enough that enough people will be happy to pay me enough money that I can focus entirely on my writing.

My wife asked me last night, “Think about what you can do that will allow us to live in China.” In my mind I could already see that the answer was writing. If I can earn money from my writing, then I can live anywhere in the world.

And the very next day – today – I come upon an article that tells me how my life will change if I write 1,000 words a day. So I got excited, and immediately decided that I needed to take up this challenge that the universe is giving me, to help me change my life.

There’s going to be some rambling involved in my writing as I flesh it out. I’m ok with that! It’s going to take a while for me to find my ‘voice’, that part of me that speaks (writes?) clearly and succinctly about the topic I want to discuss, without any rambling, and completely focused. I don’t know how long that will take, but I’ll get there eventually.

Developing the 1,000 word habit

In the already forementioned article, How writing 1000 words a day changed my life, there’s a number of tips on how to develop the habit. You can read the article for more information about the tips, but I wanted to discuss them for myself.

Using Activation Energy

Interestingly, I’ve often already used part of this tip, where I write something before going to bed, so that when I wake up the next morning I can continue on from where I left off. Having it sitting there on my screen when I sit down at my computer in the morning has been a perfect way of being inspired to continue writing on that topic that interested me the night before.

Dealing with Writer’s Block

This was something I ended up struggling with when I was in the end days of writing for Think Wisely. I couldn’t think of anything else to write about! His tip of ‘write whatever you’re thinking and don’t stop until you’ve got 1,000 words’ is a very good tip, and will be made even easier with so many topics in this blog to think about.

The willingness to create garbage

Oh, I’m willing! I know that from garbage can come some awesome results. It’s about maintaining consistency along the way.

What do you want to read about?

I know this blog and my writing is for me, and I’ll be writing about the topics that I’m interested in. But I’m also curious about what YOU are interested in. What kinds of topics would you like to see more of? If you tell me what you’d like to see more of, in line with what I’ve already written (check the Topics list above), then I can write for both me and you at the same time. Win-win! That’s always a good thing.

And now we come to the end of this post, and I’ve done 1,024 words. Woohoo! This could be easier than I thought…


Thanks for reading! Please add your own thoughts below.



Don't forget to subscribe for new posts sent to you by email!

%d bloggers like this: