How  a “Smitten Kitten” can get you writing.

By Elizabeth Cutright
© 2012 The Daily Creative Writer

What if you only wrote 100 words a day? How far would you get? In a week you’d have 700 words – almost a page. In a month you’d have 3000 words – that’s the length of a feature article in most magazines. At the end of a season, you’d have almost 10,000 words – that’s a respectable research paper or script synopsis. If you started right now and wrote on through New Years Day, you could have around almost 14,000 words, and you’d knee deep into the first chapter of your novel.

A hundred words a day is just a smidgen more than your basic poem. The paragraph above was just under 100 words and took me less than ten minutes to type. But when you’re staring at a blank page with no inspiration, 100 words might as well be one million.

So how do you start? Sometimes a goal can help. You’ll write for five minutes and then take a pulse check to see how you feel. Maybe just a quick email to a friend will do. How about a quick comment on a Facebook wall? A tweet. An update. An Instagram caption. Maybe you should just type all the colors that bounce off the top of your head and see what happens.

Or, you can write until a cute little kitten appears in the corner of your screen, which is how I started this exercise to begin with. After one paragraph, this little guy appeared on the right-hand corner of my monitor:

Ater two paragraphs, I was rewarded with a Soderbergh-ian quadrant of cuteness.

A little bit of editing to the paragraphs above, and rrwoar comes blazing on through the ether.

Everybody who’s ever been on the internet with an hour to kill – only to wind up red-eyed, hungry and cramped three hours later – knows that kittens are a powerful force, especially online. Which is why Written?Kitten! is genius. Every 100 words gets you a new feline buddy – gaze at those soft eyes, full of support and encouragement. Smile at the befuddled looks, the sleepy expressions, the playful antics. These kittens believe in you!

Look who just popped up now to cheer me on!

It’s silly, but it works. I’ve got 400 more words then when I started. Late on a Friday afternoon, when even more work still sits waiting for completion and the weekend beckons, I’ll take anything I can get; any trick that will get me to page. Today it was kittens. Soft, supportive kittens.

Who could ask for anything more?

All Content is the sole Property of Elizabeth Cutiright and The Daily Creative Writer, if you are reading this blog on another site, it has been reposted without the author’s permission and is in violation of the DMCA. © 2012 The Daily Creative Writer

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