In his John Fante’s novel Dreams from Bunker Hill, he wrote as protagonist Arturo Bandini:
I went to the typewriter and sat before it. My thought was to write a sentence, a single perfect sentence. If I could write one good sentence I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever.
The second newest article on this site is about coding the article frequency chart on my homepage. I’d meant for the feature to help hold me accountable. As much as I wanted to write on my website more often, it’s gone stale again.
So the other day I added a new project in my Todoist called “Habits.” I put a daily recurring task in there: “Write one paragraph.” One paragraph doesn’t make for worthwhile reading. But if I could write one good paragraph I could write two and if I could write two I could write three, and if I could write three I could write forever. The Arturo Bandini approach to weblog productivity.
Unfortunately, I never wrote that one paragraph. I didn‘t write one word. Back to the drawing board.
I remembered Jeremy Keith’s project where he wrote 100 blog posts for 100 days, and each of those posts was exactly 100 words long. 100 words feels clear, concrete, and manageable. Either I write them or I don’t. How long was one of my paragraphs supposed to be anyway? This I can do. Maybe not exactly 100 words or days, but those are good, round targets to aim for.
That’s when I was struck by The Developer’s Curse. I thought, “I should code a page I write on that tells me when I’ve hit my 100 word goal.” I opened CodePen. I searched for JavaScript string word count functions. I snapped out of it, closed my browser, and wrote this instead.
These 328 words were meant to be my first 100.