Prolifica
My new writing project
One of my oldest and most difficult psychological struggles has been around feeling heard.
I grew up in a household where my point-of-view was often discounted. My father is a rationalist, skeptical of anything derived from intuition or emotion. My mother is prone to both narcissism and psychosis, and resistant to any logic that threatens her view of the world. Betwixt the two, I had to tread with care.
But I always wanted to be a writer. Perhaps navigating the polarity of my parents taught me to choose words with care, to search for sentences that had the best chance of breaking through their resistance. Perhaps I just wanted people to take me and my words seriously.
Yet I’m not yet a writer, because while I wanted to be heard, I have struggled with feeling worthy of being heard. In healthy family dynamics, a person’s opinion is worthy because they are a member of the family; nothing else is required. But that wasn’t my experience.
So I felt I had to be brilliant, or have the right credentials, or have the right opinions, before I could risk standing up to speak—or sitting down to write. But that’s a myth. There are no qualifications for being a writer, other than the act itself. So that’s what I intend to do.
My goal is to become a prolific writer. To achieve prolificacy, I need to publish often. Quality doesn’t matter. Consistency does. For now, I’ve settled on the following cadences:
one short essay every day, 6 days a week, 250-1000 words
one long essay every week, 2000-5000 words
one short story every week, 2000-10,000 words
I may adjust this schedule in the future, but that’s where I want to start. I consider this week an experiment, open to future revision.
So for this week, I commit to the following:
1 hour per day on the short essay
1 hour per day on the long essay
1 hour per weekday on the short story, 3 hours on one weekend day
To give myself some personal stakes, if I don’t achieve these time + output goals this week, I’ll donate $500 to charity. Next week, I’ll revisit this schedule.
If nothing else, I hope this project will help me realize the truth that I’ve always reached towards: that I don’t need anyone’s permission to share my words, and that doing so can be an act of joy.