Competition…and how it’s helping my writing.

Most people wouldn’t consider me a competitive person. That’s not the case, however. If I’m playing a game, any game, my goal is to win. I just don’t outwardly show my competitive nature. Let me explain how my competiveness comes into play when I put pencil to paper.*

It’s no secret that I’ve been struggling with Drummer Girl. Why? I could go on and on. This band is downright toxic, so toxic that it’s hard for me to write sometimes. And there is all the things that come along with being an author that no one tells you about (at least they didn’t tell me about)- namely marketing you books while writing them.Then of course, my inner critic/imposter syndrome comes into play here as well. So the word count in Drummer Girl has been slow to come.

But I booked some time with an editor in the fall, but that means, there has to be a book for her to edit so I’ve been telling myself I need to get moving. I’ve challenged myself to write every day in May in Drummer Girl. I’ve been successful so far- if you follow me on Instagram, Threads or Facebook, you’ve likely seen my weekly accountability posts about my word counts for each day in that week.

But Amy, you might be saying to yourself, that’s not really competition…and you’d be right. I struggled during the first full week of May to get words in. My day job has been incredibly busy, life had been getting in the way and my word counts- while they were there were disappointingly low that week.

Around that time I joined a fellow author’s discord because she set up part of the discord to be authors only. Just general encouragement and that kind of thing. And one of the author only areas is a writing sprint channel and on a lark- I took part in one. If you aren’t familiar- a writing sprint is exactly what it sounds like- you and others just sit down and write as many words as you can in a set amount of time- 10, 15, 20 minutes.

I’ve seen other authors do writing sprints but I had never taken part before. But I surprised myself because I found I really liked it. A whole lot. It was a quick way to knock out some words because I forced myself to concentrate on nothing but writing during that short block of time. No distractions allowed.

That first day there were three of us sprinting together and just the competition of getting those words in urged me to keep going. Since then I’ve managed to sprint a few times with others, but sometimes this is hard for me because I am on the west coast and I work M-F 7:00 am – 4:00 pm. So I’ve also recently started sprinting in there alone and I still love it. It’s just a way for me to challenge myself to sit down and just write as many words as possible. No phone, no socials, no going down a research or spotify rabbit hole. I tend to find it easy to convince myself to do something else author related that isn’t writing- and that’s a bad thing for my stories. The sprints help me time box in a way, so that I am writing during specific times (usually early evenings) with no distractions allowed. It’s working because since I have been sprinting nearly daily- I’ve been really getting those daily words in.

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*I don’t actually use pencils- I write on a computer- but if I did have to write it manually I’d use a pen because pencils dull too quick and then I’d just spend all my writing time sharpening pencils!