Last week on Pinterest… (doesn’t that sound like the intro for a really boring sitcom?) I read and pinned a blog post claiming to help me write 10,000 words in a single day. The author of the post made some good points, and although 10,000 is an impossible goal for someone who doesn’t write full-time (as the author does), the tips were still helpful. Since I pinned that post, I’ve been recommended several other similar posts by Pinterest. I’m not sure whether it’s cause-and-effect of thinking about speed-writing, or if it’s just coincidence, but by the end of last week, I hit a string of days where everything got so hard. I couldn’t have written slower if I were chiseling my words in stone. I tried some of the tips in the post; nothing helped. I finally eked out the last 300 words of my weekly quota late Friday afternoon. It took me nearly an hour. And I know I’m going to have to re-write that scene.

Is this what they call “writer’s block?” When it feels like squeezing blood from a stone just to get one more word on the page? When you immediately judge the words you do manage to write as terrible? Or does the “block” mean that you can’t write at all? I’ve never understood that. In what other job are you allowed to just stop doing what you’re doing, and say you’re blocked? I can’t just stop teaching in the middle of a class of students and say, “I’m sorry guys, I’m creatively blocked, so I can’t figure out how to end this lesson. I’ll let you know when we can pick it up again.” (And if you think teaching is a less creative profession than writing, you’ve never tried to figure out how to make forty unique individuals learn the same concept.)

I do have bad teaching days, where I feel uninspired and disconnected from the kids. I get through them, and hope for a better today tomorrow. The better day always comes. I take the same approach to writing. I don’t think you stop just because it gets really, really hard. I think, if you truly want to succeed, you just keep going. Maybe you take a short break. But you don’t abandon your goal or timeline. One bad day should not turn into a string of empty days.

So I didn’t get to 10,000 words in seven days last week, let alone one. But I consider it just as much an accomplishment that I wrote 300 words at the end of an exhausting day on Friday. Maybe they won’t even make it into the book. I’ll still celebrate them as a part of the process.