Ash Kingery

300 words a day isn’t much. The math, however, is in your favor. 300 times 30? 9000. 300 times 365? Congratulations, you just wrote a 109,500 word book. That’s longer than Water for Elephants. (No shade, obviously.)

At the very end of last year, I decided I was going to devote 300 words a day to my middle grade fantasy novel. I’m currently in the “30% to 70%” stage, as Brandon Sanderson defined it in a Polygon article–the part where you start getting distracted, because now you’re stuck writing the middle. Jimmy Eat World tells us that the middle is a transitory state of being, that everything (everything) will be alright (alright). But it also sucks absolute ass. Writing the beginning is fun! The world is your oyster! Writing the end is fun! Tying up all those loose ends and hitting the climax is satisfying! It’s getting from the beginning to the end that sucks, because the only way out is through.

Making it manageable by breaking it up into 300 words a day, however, has made it so much more enjoyable. I don’t love where it’s going right now, but that’s okay–it’s a first draft. It doesn’t have to be good yet. It just has to get finished. Once it’s finished, I can start to improve it. 300 words really isn’t a lot. In fact, I often go over the minimum, even by just a few words, since it’s nearly impossible to finish a sentence and hit 300 even at the same time. And when I do go over, whether it’s by 50 words or 200, I feel accomplished, because I exceeded my goal.

History, which is admittedly a bit wiggly here, says that three hundred Spartans held off the entire Persian army at Thermopylae. What can three hundred words do for you? Quite a lot, it turns out.

By the way, this post is 320 words.