Word Sprints

I've been participating in some fun word sprints with my friends this past week as part of NaNoWriMo.

A bunch of us went to Park City for a few days' writer's retreat, which was awesomesauce.

One of the most helpful parts of the retreat were these little 30 and 15 minute contests we would do. You check your "before" word count, write like crazy for however long, stop at the end of the allotted time, and the highest word count wins.

The last one we did, I ended up with 1,301 words written in a mere 30 minutes. I think the winner of that particular contest had 1,306 words, so I narrowly missed victory, but it still felt epic. I turned my internal editor so far off, I wasn't even correcting spellin' errers. Which is maybe a little too far, but maybe not. I mean, you wanna get your first draft written, right? And you know you're going to have to go back and edit, anyway, right? Right.

So we've been continuing on with the word sprint challenges now that we're home, and last night I finally had a second off from my crazy schedule and joined in. It was a 1k in 1hour challenge, and I came away with just over 2400 words. In one hour!

This is the first time in my life I've really been able to turn off the stinkin' editor and just write, and it's awesome!

If you've been joining in the word sprint madness, let me know how it's going for you! If you haven't tried it yet, what are you waiting for? It's fun! It boosts your word count! You get to finally tell your internal editor to stuff it!

So join in the fun, and then report back here how it's going. (P.S. it's a little-known secret, but just so you know, you don't have to be doing NaNo to benefit from word sprints. It's just a great exercise no matter what.)

1 comment:

  1. LOL, this is awesome Jenn. YOU are awesome (btw, I blogged about you and something you said about being awesome in one of our crit groups, lol). Anyway, I've done some wordsprints with a friend before, but not this time around with NaNo, and it is a ton of fun.

    And huzzah for turning off your editor! That chick's had you by the balls for far too long!

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