Every great person has become great,
Every successful person has succeeded,
in proportion as they have confined their
powers to one particular channel. ​

You may have heard of it, but maybe it's time for a bit of publicity again, to try and build a more free-flowing, writing focussed writing circle where those who struggle with their output, or their technique, or their ability to discuss those issues they encounter in their writing can come to find like-minded individuals.

I am of course referring to:

THE 500 CLUB

I'm by no means the owner, opener or agenda-setter, but here's how I might see us building an active, progressive, and constructive club that builds you up and encourages you in overcoming the struggles with your writing that we all have, and there's two main selling points (over and above a place to encourage your writing regularly) that I think might get it there.

1) SMART goal setting.

Cliche as it may sound, but, at least with myself, I have a nebulous plan and get nebulous results.

If you've not encountered it, SMART represents a few criteria for making indefinite planning definite.

S is Specific, M is measurable, A nd R is Achievable and Realistic, and T is timely.

Particularly, we want to do the unusual step for writers of holding to that T. For example, I want to write more of my own stupid Harry Potter AU, and I want to reach Hogwarts, which I expect would be about Chapter 4 or 5. That seems pretty reasonable, it's probably not more than 30,000 words. I'm not very focussed at the best of the times, but if I tried, without impacting the rest of my life dramatically: I bet I could do it by the end of August.

If you want to be brave, come and join us and tell us your own SMART targets as regards to your fiction.

The five hundred club was founded with the idea of a one size fits all goal, 500 words a day. But if you want to set your own believable and achievable target, come and join us and tell us what it is.​

2) Reflective practice.

(why is this indent shorter?)
Anyway, as much as I hate the amount of corporate away day stuff I'm adopting here: Where else can you be so self-indulgent as to reflect on your writing process, your pieces and your problems, but also achieve such clear results?

Reflection, as I mean it here, is to write down what you have done, why you have done it, and how you feel about it after the fact. Then, possibly, after all that, what you think you might do going forward, after having clarified it for yourself.

I rarely have something ready for WbA, I'm not confident on a story often and I want to be much further along before I post an early section. However, I often have things I'm struggling to achieve, things I'm wanting to think about and problems I'm not progressing through with where I've gotten to.

When you join the five hundred club, you can feel free to share your problems, share your successes, and be specific to what the issue is and why it's holding you up (or how you overcame it). The very act of writing it down from inside that noggin of yours will probably show you a road through, and if not, it'll help organise the issue clearly. Of course, if you're wanting, your club mates can offer their own ideas!

Of course, we have threads to this purpose here, I hear you cry. Perhaps you might find the scope too limited, and an entire dedicated thread to yourself too much, so come do it in a more informal setting.
​

So, finally, it's your club, too. If you'd like it to be. What would you want to see, what would help you improve it?

Importantly, why don't you want to join? Thinking about that and telling us might come up with more ideas than anything.

Come write as often as you can, as disciplined as you can. I bet you'll be satisfied when you succeed.
--- Post automerged ---
To our second option choosing friends above, you fail 100% of the things you don’t try.

 

I like that one person has selected the: No, and I'll tell you for why...option, and yet they did not tell you why.

For shame.

 

No, and I'll tell you why. I tried before and failed. It just doesn't work for me. I write in bursts.

 

Can you schedule a period in your week, where you can sit down and do a burst—once a week?

500 words three days a week vs 3000 if you sit down on Saturday mornings? Well, you should go for the second one, right? I’d still say you could come and pop that goal in the club, imo.

 

Regularity just isn't a thing for me. I've had weeks where I knocked out 10k words, I've had periods of not a word for months. January 2020 has been productive. February was the opposite (though I was sick for half of it). This week I have about 4k words so far, so March is looking good for now.

 

No, and I'll tell you for why.

I gave this a lot of thought, as the attraction is certainly there. I think that for some this is a really great idea and anyone who wants to get over that hump of getting words on a page should really think about getting involved.

It's just not for me. I'm not convinced that it's measuring the right thing for me. And incentivising the wrong thing can be as bad or even worse than not measuring anything. When I know what words I want to write, getting them down isn't a problem. Hell, I have no doubt I could write 500 words of different drabbles every day for a year with little issue, assuming I don't get frustrated/disheartened by the fact that I'm not producing anything meaningful to me. I'm just not sure that that's a battle I want to fight.

I want to focus on writing the right words and, more than that, iterating on them. I want to improve the quality of what I produce (I say produce because it's about the whole planning, outlining, drafting, revising, editing process), and I'm not convinced by the argument that you somehow magically get better at the rest of that stuff by just focusing on writing more words.

As a software engineer I see the 500 words a day KPI to be like measuring lines of code written.