Results of My First-Ever 10K Day

By Milli Thornton

The reason we have a regular 10K event here at the FoW blog is because, five years ago, my friend Jenny Turner invited me to do a 10K Day with her. I don’t know where Jenny first heard of it, but back then the procedure was to keep in touch by email. It was just Jenny and me that day—but that was enough to give me my first amazing taste of the camaraderie that comes with a good 10K Day.

Thanks, Jenny!

With our two 10K Days coming up next week, I went back in the archives to February, 2006 and relived a post I wrote about my first-ever 10K Day. Thought I’d share it with you.

First, I’d like to say that . . .

. . . I had very low expectations on myself in terms of productivity. I had been too busy to get much writing done and I simply wanted to feel creative again and have some fun. I made a list of writing to work on, but I didn’t set a word count for myself. I vaguely had it in my mind that I would be over the moon to get 5,000 words done.

What I discovered was that this exercise pulled things out of me I didn’t know I was capable of. Even though I cheated by getting up late (it was Sunday and I wanted to sleep in), once I got there I stuck to the routine and it worked like a charm. I ended up with 10,277 words.

I had never been one for productivity over creativity. But there’s something about the routine of the 10-K Day that produces super-human efforts—but with much less strain and resistance than I ever thought possible.

A 10-K Day is not about perfect writing. You’re inevitably going to rewrite or even completely cut some of the words you’ve written—as it should be. “The art of writing is in the rewriting.”

(Who said that? I don’t remember, but I’m a believer!)

My Surprised Conclusions

For me, the 10-K Day has been a gigantic eye-opener. We tend to go through life believing we’re capable of much less than we really are. I’ve compared myself to more “prolific” writers so often I actually came to believe they were born that way and I wasn’t.

Now I know.

Not that I now believe in the value of productivity over creativity. Instead I made a quantum leap into believing both are possible. They don’t always have to be in the same moment, or even the same day. But there are days when we can live the life of a genius—if we do a little preparation and stick to a proven formula.

Geniuses are geniuses, in part, because they produce a lot of ideas and then try them out.

So it can be with writing. It all starts with an idea.

Milli Thornton

Milli Thornton is the author of Fear of Writing: for writers & closet writers. She is owner of the Fear of Writing Online Course, where her mission is to put the fun back into writing. Milli blogs at Screenwriting in the Boonies and Milliver’s Travels and coaches writers individually at Writer’s Muse.