Unicorn Days

Not all writing days are the same, except on your calendar.

On your calendar, Tuesday looks pretty much like Wednesday. You have your writing time blocked out. You have a word-count target. If you’re working from a production schedule, you know exactly how many words you should write that day.

Then Tuesday arrives and you scrape together 800 words while fighting for every sentence.

Wednesday, you sit down and write 3,000 words without drama. You finish at a sensible hour and go about the rest of your day.

And Thursday?  Thursday, something happens. You start writing and the story takes off.

Hours disappear. Meals become optional. You’re no longer consciously constructing sentences so much as trying to keep up with a story that seems to be happening just ahead of your fingertips.

Eventually you emerge blinking into the real world, mentally wrung out and feeling slightly drunk.  And you’ve written a ridiculous number of words.

I’ve had days like that. Twelve thousand words. Fifteen thousand.  Fifteen thousand is my high tide line.

So far.

The Statistical Crime

The problem with having a spectacular writing day is that it’s very easy to turn it into evidence against yourself.

I wrote 12,000 words that day. Which quietly becomes: So why can’t I write 12,000 words today?

Or perhaps you’re more reasonable than that. You don’t expect 12K. But 5K ought to be possible, surely?

Then you have a day when you write 1,500 words, and somehow those perfectly good 1,500 words feel disappointing.

You’ve committed a statistical crime. You’ve taken an exceptional day and turned it into a benchmark.

I think there’s a better way to look at writing days. Instead of treating every day as the same unit of production, I think there are three different types of writing day.

1. Maintenance days,
2. Workhorse days, and
3. Unicorn days.

Maintenance Days

Some days, getting to the desk is an achievement.

Life happens. You’re tired. You’ve been interrupted sixteen times. The scene won’t cooperate. Your concentration is shot. You’ve got appointments, family obligations, business problems, or one of the approximately seven billion other things that can make a writing day difficult.

That’s a maintenance day.

The objective isn’t to hit your usual word-count target. The objective is to maintain contact with the book.

Maybe you write 500 words. Maybe 1,000. Maybe you get one scene down. Perhaps you work out what happens next and write enough of the next scene that you’ll have somewhere obvious to start tomorrow.

The number isn’t really the point. You’re keeping the story alive in your head. You’re making it easier to come back tomorrow. And you’re preserving momentum.

That’s not a failed writing day. It’s maintenance.

Workhorse Days

These are the days to aim for.

You show up. You know what you’re writing. You put in your normal hours and produce something around your normal word count. Nothing supernatural happens. You just work.

Depending upon the writer, that might mean 2,000 words. It might mean 5,000. It might mean 800. Again, the specific number isn’t important. What matters is that this is your normal, sustainable production.

Workhorse days aren’t terribly exciting, which may be why we don’t appreciate them enough. But these are the days that finish novels.

One workhorse day isn’t impressive. A hundred of them are.

Your production schedule should be built around your workhorse days, because these are the days you can reasonably expect to reproduce.

Then, every once in a while, a unicorn wanders into the room.

Unicorn Days

If you’ve ever had one, you already know what I’m talking about. A unicorn day can’t be defined by word count. For one writer it might produce 4,000 words. For another, 8,000. For someone else, 15,000.

You’ll absolutely know when you’re having a unicorn day.

The normal friction disappears. The story is there. You’re in it. You know exactly what happens next and you’re typing as fast as you can to keep up. You look at the clock and discover several hours have vanished.

You should probably eat something. You don’t particularly want to.

Eventually you stagger away from the computer feeling exhausted, exhilarated and just a little bit drunk.

That’s a unicorn day.

You can’t order one up for Tuesday. But you can create conditions that make good writing more likely. You can know your story, eliminate distractions, improve your typing speed, use sprints, and arrange long stretches of uninterrupted writing time.

But you can’t demand that particular magic show up on schedule. That’s why it’s a unicorn.

It’s a gift. And when you get one, ride the damn thing.

If your normal daily target is 3,000 words and you reach 3,000 at noon while the book is pouring out of you, why would you stop? Because your spreadsheet says you’re done?

Keep going. See what happens. Find out where today’s high tide line is.

Don’t Turn the Unicorn Into a Workhorse

This is the danger.

You wrote 10K yesterday. Wonderful. That does not mean you’ve just discovered that you’re capable of writing 10K every day.

Of course you’re capable of writing 10K in a day. You just did it. That doesn’t make it your sustainable daily production rate.

The unicorn is spectacular precisely because it isn’t an ordinary writing day. Enjoy the word count. Enjoy that slightly demented feeling of Where the hell did THAT come from?

Just don’t sit down the next morning and demand an encore.

Your workhorse is still waiting for you.

And Don’t Spend Your Unicorn Winnings

There’s another trap waiting the morning after a unicorn day. You can start doing arithmetic.

I normally write 3,000 words a day. I wrote 12,000 yesterday. Technically, I’m three days ahead. Therefore, I can take today off.

Taking the day off feels justified, but you’ll be giving up a narrative advantage that yesterday has given you:  After a unicorn day, you’ve just spent hours immersed in the book. The characters are alive in your head. You know the world. You know where you’ve been and, very likely, where you’re going next.

Why deliberately break that connection?

You may be exhausted. That’s reasonable. A 12K or 15K day can leave you feeling like you’ve been plugged directly into the mains for several hours.

So don’t demand another workhorse day. Have a maintenance day.

Write 500 words. Write 1,000. Open the manuscript and move the story forward a little. Leave yourself a nice runway for tomorrow. But touch the book.

Don’t let yesterday’s extraordinary momentum crash and burn because you decided you’d earned three days away from the manuscript. A unicorn day is a bonus. It isn’t an advance against next week’s writing.

What About Hitting the Mattresses?

Longtime PIFW readers may be wondering how this fits with something I’ve talked about for years: hitting the mattresses.

It doesn’t. They’re two different things.

Hitting the mattresses is a tactic. I hit the mattresses when I’ve fallen badly behind my production schedule and need to catch up. I deliberately clear the decks. Admin gets reduced to the essentials. Weekends, evenings and other available time get pressed into service. I use sprints and remove distractions and generally floor the gas pedal until I’ve recovered.

It’s deliberate extreme effort in response to a production problem.

On the other hand, a unicorn day is not a tactic. It’s a classification. I can’t decide to have one.  It just happens sometimes when I sit down expecting a normal workhorse day and, somewhere along the way, realize I’m riding a unicorn.

Hitting the mattresses may result in some very high word-count days, but I’m manufacturing those numbers through extra time and deliberate effort. 

On a unicorn day, the words seem to be manufacturing themselves.

Both can leave me looking slightly haunted afterward. Only one has a horn.

Stop Asking Every Day for the Same Thing

I think one reason writers beat themselves up so much over productivity is that we have only one mental category: Writing day.  And a writing day comes with a number attached.

If my target is 3,000 words, then 3,000 means I succeeded. 1,200 means I failed. 6,000 means I had a fantastic day.

12,000 means: Apparently I should be able to write 12,000 words, so why the hell did I only write 3,000 today?

It’s a wonderful system if your objective is to find a reason to feel guilty regardless of how much you write.  (Something that many writers are exceptionally talented at.)

The three types of writing day give us a better question. Instead of asking: Did I hit my number?  Ask:  What kind of writing day am I having?

If it’s a maintenance day, maintain. Don’t use the label as a fancy new excuse for procrastination. If you’ve got a perfectly ordinary workhorse day available to you, then work.

But if today genuinely is a maintenance day, stop flagellating yourself because it didn’t produce a workhorse word count. Keep contact with the book. Protect the momentum. Come back tomorrow.

If it’s a workhorse day, work. These are the days to aim for. These are the days your production schedule should be built around. They’re sustainable, repeatable and wonderfully ordinary.

And if it’s a unicorn day? Get out of the way. Don’t stop because you’ve reached an arbitrary number that made perfect sense when you put it on the calendar. Ride it. You don’t know when you’ll see another one.

Three Different Days

Not all writing days are the same, except on your calendar.  So perhaps we should stop expecting them to be.

Aim for workhorse days. Settle for maintenance days when that’s genuinely what you’ve got. And when you’re suddenly on fire, don’t decide you’ve written enough for today.

Ride the unicorn. See where it takes you. Find your new high tide line.

Then come back tomorrow and write again.

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