Regimen - 1,000 Words

A lazy Labor Day, even for those of us who no longer have office jobs to be away from. In the afternoon I went to Peet's with my little orange notebook to face the rigor of my daily one thousand words. Now that I'm done with the big edit of my memoir I need to get back to fresh work.

I've read countless interviews with well-known writers in which they talk about the importance of writing a thousand words a day. I heard Lisa See talk about this last week -- she says she starts her books at the beginning and marches through to the end, one thousand words at a time. Sometimes that a short amount of time at the desk each day and sometimes it's endless. I have more trouble with the idea of going through a book in the order in which it will appear at the end than I do with the wisdom of a thousand words a day.

So I got my cappuccino and a nice table in the shade outside. I opened my book and thought about where I could pick up. I have three things in progress -- a short story featuring an old Russian woman who was a ballet dancer in her youth, a novel about a middle-aged woman contemplating whether to take up again with her boyfriend from college, and a novel about the "guitar woman" (for lack of a better label). All are sitting ready for my attention.

So what happens? A young woman named Sophie appears under my pen, who is sitting at a cafe in a small town in Italy waiting to meet the man she thought she would spend the rest of her life with until he unceremoniously threw her out of his apartment three months before. Why? I have no idea. But maybe I will find out tomorrow.