will capitalize on it. When they feel the momentum, more things seem to go right for them. The ball seems to bounce in their favor. The breaks seem to come their way. And what do the opponents do when they notice this happening? They try to interrupt the course of the game. They’ll call a time-out. They’ll fake an injury. They’ll try to slow the action down. They’ll do anything to destroy the steadiness of the contest. They want to destroy the momentum, and they know that interruptions can do that.
Interruptions can destroy your writing momentum, too. So try to keep the action flowing. Make sure the keyboard keeps humming and new words keep appearing on your monitor screen.
Writing to a quota also helps you build up a body of work. Obviously, if you keep producing, you’re going to build up product. When it comes time to send out samples of your work, you’ll have a good supply to select from. This will be beneficial in trying to entice new clients or in sending out samples of your work for possible employment.
Now let’s look at what your quota should be:
Personalized: Notice the sentence above said “your quota,” and that’s what it should be. It should be designed by you to accommodate the kind of writing you intend to do and geared to the skills and the writing speed that you have.
The quota you determine should reflect the type of writing you do. It would be silly to say “I’ll write ten jokes a day” if you’re trying to write a humorous novel. Vowing to write one act or one scene each week wouldn’t be too helpful if you were trying to create a stand-up comedy routine. You have to figure out what sort of production will best suit your specific writing goals.
Challenging: To get the best results you should get out of your comfort zone. Force a little bit of exertion into your quota. To illustrate the value of this, imagine a golfer who wants to improve his putting so he decides to hit thirty putts each day. That’s commendable. However, suppose he puts the ball down in each instance only eight inches away from the cup. That’s not going to produce worthwhile results. It doesn’t challenge his skills, so it won’t improve them.
Likewise, you as a writer must devise a quota that has some bite to it. Your quota has to be demanding enough to be beneficial. A comedy writer who says “I’ll write one joke a day” or a novelist who says “I’ll write thirty words of my novel each day” will not produce significant results.
As they say with physical exercise, “No pain; no gain”; you have to crank some pain, some discomfort into your personalized quota.
Reasonable: Just as there is no value in designing a quota that has no challenge to it, so there is no benefit in devising a quota that is too demanding or even impossible. The idea is to work steadily toward a goal, not drive yourself to a nervous breakdown. Let’s return to our golfer who practiced faithfully, but only on eight-inch putts. Now let’s imagine that he goes out every day and hits thirty putts that are all over fifty feet long. What’s the point? Putts that long do require some skill, but mostly they demand pure luck. You can’t practice, nor can you perfect, luck. This practice time, too, is wasted.
It would be just as silly and nonproductive for a writer to pledge to write two hundred one-liners each day or to write five half-hour sitcoms each week. These demands are—well, they’re too demanding.
Not only do they not produce usable results, but they tend to be discouraging. You find you can’t keep up the impossible pace, so you abandon your efforts with the excuse, “Well, I tried, but I couldn’t do it.”
Set goals or quotas that are challenging but attainable.
Specific: It’s hard to meet a quota if you don’t really know what that quota is. “I’ll write a lot of one-liners today.” “I’ll write jokes until I can’t think of anything funny to write anymore.” With these sorts of quotas, you don’t really know when you’ve achieved them. They’re too vague. How much is a lot? How can you be sure that you’ve exhausted all the “funniness” that’s in you?
Specify the quantity. Vow to write five jokes a day. Vow to write ten jokes a day. You determine how many you can write because it is your personalized quota, but do make that goal measurable. Determining to write a bunch of pages is not really a quota. Determining to write ten pages is. Determining today to write a lot of words in your novel is not a quota. Determining to write 2,500 words today is.
Goal-oriented: This attribute, too, has to do with being specific. Your quota should guarantee that when you meet it, you have product in hand. It is specific to say “I’ll work on my writing for two hours today—from 10 a.m. to noon.” That’s definitely specific, but it doesn’t necessarily generate any tangible results. It’s quite possible that you could sit at the keyboard for those two hours and produce no usable results. Nevertheless, you’ve fulfilled your promise. You worked for two hours.
It’s commendable that you are dedicated enough to sit at your keyboard for that long. However, it’s more commendable if you generate quality material while you’re sitting there. I’m pretty sure that when your boss hands you a work assignment he doesn’t say, “Work on this for a week.” He’d be more likely to say, “Have this on my desk by Friday.” Results are what count; not how long it takes you to achieve them.
You’re better served if you assign a specific goal to your work. It’s fine to set aside two hours to do it in, but make sure that your two hours of effort create a concrete product. If you reach that goal early, you can take some time off or keep going and produce even more results. If you don’t achieve your specific goal, maybe you have to stay at the keyboard a little longer.
Clients can buy only results, not effort.
Divided into reasonably short segments: We’ve already discovered that interruptions are momentum breakers. However, you can’t write continuously. Both you and your computer deserve a rest sometime. The trick now is to keep the interruptions from interfering with the momentum as much as possible. This is accomplished by keeping the work periods relatively steady. Set your quota for as short a period as is reasonable.
Strangely, there is a difference between resolving to write one act of my four-act teleplay this week and resolving to write all four acts of my teleplay by the end of the month. One function of your quota is to keep you turning out material at a fairly steady rate. Presumably, if you stick to your quota, you will do that.
But let’s look at this difference more closely. Resolving to write four acts of your teleplay by the end of the month means that if you don’t produce one act at the end of the first week, you’re still on quota. Right? If you still have nothing on paper by the end of the second week, you’re still on quota. If you continue to get no writing done, you’re still on quota at the end of the third week. Now you have only one week left to get four acts written. You’ve moved into the “unreasonable” area of your quota. In effect, you’re still living up to your promised quota, but you have destroyed the momentum.
However, if you determine to write one act of your teleplay each week, and you get nothing done that first week, you’re now off quota. You have to get yourself moving. So as we discussed earlier, it’s more beneficial to hit 20 golf balls a day than it is to put it off and hit 600 at the end of the month.
But again, this is your quota. You design it. You can set a schedule that demands daily results or you can set one that allows for results every other day. You can even set weekly goals. Going beyond that time span, though, may defeat
