Someone in the Slack group I belong to posted a Ray Bradbury quote awhile back:

“The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”

Per LitHub, this is from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001.

I love this idea, and on a semi-conscious level began doing just that about four or five weeks ago—writing one short story per week. So far, so good. I have managed to more or less complete the task each week. I might be a day late now and then, but I have done it.

This week, I am on vacation. Or “staycation” I guess since I am not going anywhere—partly because of COVID, partly because I want to be home. I am pretending for this week that I am a full time professional writer. Or at least I am trying. It’s hard to be super disciplined about it when all I really want to do is lie down on the bed with an ice pack and fall asleep. Our A/C is on the fritz and it is HOT in here.

But for the most part, I am doing alright with this plan. And since I am pretending to be a full time writer for the week, I am also upping my weekly short story goal. Just for this one week, I will write two of them. I will also spend time editing and submitting to literary journals. (Did I mention I received my first rejection letter recently? I think that means I’m a “real” writer now. It feels like a rite of passage. I suspect I will have many many more.)

This also happens to be the week of the second, shorter, #1000wordsofsummer for 2020. Good timing, totally unplanned. So that challenge is definitely helping me with the inspiration and discipline as well.

As for the quality of the stories I’m writing, I hope Bradbury was right. That it’s impossible to write 52 (or 53) bad short stories. I actually think some of mine are pretty good. I’ll find out soon enough if anyone else agrees.