The Seinfeld Calendar
Inspired by a post by Jack Cheng highlighted recently on the 99 percent blog, I’ve decided to try a new approach to writing in 2010. Instead of subjecting my psyche to continuous hours of creative torture, I’m going to try writing for 30 minutes every day to become a better writer.
Cheng suggests such an approach works because “when trying to develop a new skill, the important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it.”
My writing has a long way to go, and whilst I know in part that having to write for hours on end will become necessary at some point during my novel escapade, for now momentum is more important to me.
You see, I work well with deadlines. When I have a strict deadline I can pull the long hours. The problem is, now that university is behind me all my deadlines seem a lot blurrier than they used to. It’s not hard to ask for an extension when the part of my brain assigned to goal setting is also home to the impulse to sit on the couch and watch TV. The hard line of an approaching deadline just isn’t there anymore.
Sure I should set my own deadlines, be in control of my own goals, that sort of thing. But this early into my novel, the primary goal is simply to not give up.
To keep things ticking along, momentum is what’s required. Long stints in front of the keyboard usually burn me out, and it can be weeks before I pluck up the courage to return to the results. But a cyclic process of returning to the task at hand might work.
During the height of my thesis what I enjoyed the most was being constantly inhabited by my characters. As each day required me to write something, even if it was just a few lines scribbled at the cafe, the end process felt like I was living my story, working bit by bit towards the inevitable end. Cheng suggests one way of achieving this kind of momentum is to commit 30 minutes a day to a particular goal, whether that be learning a craft, improving your language skills or, in my case, becoming a better writer. He says:
When software developer Brad Isaac asked Jerry Seinfeld, who in those days was still a touring comic, what his secret was, he advised Isaac to pick up one of those wall calendars that had the entire year on a single page. To Seinfeld, becoming a better comedian meant writing every day, so each day Jerry worked on his writing, he would put a big red X in the box for that day. Pretty soon, there’d be a chain of red Xs and not breaking the chain became its own motivation.
I’m thinking this doesn’t sound like too bad an idea. So I did some searching around and discovered a nice guy named Chris has gone and made a free PDF of such a calendar. They call it the Seinfeld Calendar.
So I crossed out my first X today with this post. It felt very satisfying.
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