The Great Summer Writing Season

by

Scott D. Parker

Here in the United States, summer officially begins this weekend. Actually Memorial Day. It ends 98 days later on Labor Day, 1 September.  I know it is a great time to travel, watch summer blockbuster movies--Superman! Fantastic Four. Superman. Mission Impossible (last night). Jurassic World. Did I mention Superman?--catch up on some TV, sit on the patio or beach or dock and sip something cold, and just enjoy the summer vibe.

But it can also be used to write.

Think of it: perfect bookends. There is a beginning and an end. There are 98 days of summer if you don’t include either holiday but do count weekends. If you were to write up to 1,000 words per day, more or less an hour, you’d have a novel.

Okay, you say, what about weekends? There are 28 Saturdays and Sundays this summer. Doing the math, that is 70 weekdays. At 1,000 words a day, that 70,000 words, still a novel.

But let’s say you don’t reach 1,000 words a day. What if you only spend 30 minutes a day and produce 500 words? That’s 49,000 words, an old-fashioned novel, the kind Erle Stanley Gardner or Donald Westlake used to write . If you take out the weekends, that brings you down to 35,000 words, still very respectable.

And I’m only thinking novels here. Imagine if you wrote a short story per week. That’s 14 new short stories.

This is just to get you thinking about continuing your writing during what Dean Wesley Smith calls the Time of Great Forgetting, when your New Year’s Day resolutions to write more are ignored. You can do this. Just start on Monday and keep going. And like I mentioned to a co-worker, give yourself the grace to ramp up as slowly as you need to. Writing, even though you will have frustrating days, is supposed to be fun. Those numbers are merely aspirational guidelines. 

I’ll be finishing up a novel rather than starting a new one. And I might tackle some shorter fiction. I've got a few projects that are sitting and waiting for my attention. 

So, figure out what you want to write this weekend, carve out the time on your schedule, and maybe you'll reach those magical words by Labor Day: The End.