First of all, I love the picture of this little girl. It makes me smile every time I see it. Not to mention most of the memes made from it make me laugh. But onto word sprints, writing sprints, word wars; aka whatever the heck you want to call them. I’ve heard about word sprints but I hadn’t done them until recently. Why? I don’t know. Mainly because the people I knew doing them, would pick a time that my kids were getting ready for bed. As it is, there are times when I need to write and let them run crazy through the house, but I try and make sure that I’m there when they’re going to bed. But at the writing retreat I went to recently, we did writing sprints. Now a lot people do this during NaNoWriMo and call it Word Wars. What is that? It’s when crazy people set out and write a book in the month of November. Like 60,000 words. These writers are amazing. I haven’t done it, but I’ve had many friends who have. That’s 2000 words a day. That’s a lot of writing and dedication.
Anyways, back to my discovery of writing sprints. So we did them at the retreat and I loved it. We did them in like 10-15 minute chunks. When they say start, you just go. Kind of like this photo.
Totally feel like this kid when I’m doing sprints. Because you’re not supposed to edit or go back. You just write until the timer goes off. Then you tally up the word count and compare with others. At retreat is was more like word wars because there were prizes for the those with the highest word count.
I found though that if I want to be successful in these sprints, I need to plan ahead. It really helps me to have an idea, or a scene that I want to work on. The words flow a lot easier for me than.
So now, my critique group and I will do sprints online. Basically, we get on Facebook, open up a chat and one of us will keep a timer, and then off we go. I totally recommend anyone writing to do these. It also helps when you’re feeling like you’re in a writing rut. Some ladies at retreat did a writing prompt and it really helps get the creative juices flowing. Also, I try and to do like three or 4 sessions of sprinting. The first sprint is kind of okay, but after that, the words usually fly.