by Selah Bell

With the start of each new year comes a flood of revived goals, hopes, and dreams: Things we thought we could make happen years ago, and then a few less years ago, and then last year too. The ordinary everyday has a bad habit of sneaking up on these kinds of goals and it’s not long before they’re swept away in the current of life, only for us to bump into them at the dawn of each new year.

If you’re anything like me, these goals often have to do with writing or other creative endeavors and when you don’t achieve them quickly it can feel like a massive failing. We live in a culture that pushes productivity, and though this can be motivational, I think it has also blinded many of us to the fact that small, consistent efforts can be just as effective as efficient bursts of energy.

We’ve all heard legends of authors like Stephen King drafting full novels in a week or less and while I hope and pray that someday I will be able to achieve that kind of flow state (sans the cocaine) I don’t think it likely. Some people are just faster writers than others, and while the Brandon Sandersons of the world seem capable of popping out a new book every time they go on vacation, I fall on the much slower side of the writing spectrum.

For others, the thing standing in the way of writing that fifth 100,000-word space opera isn’t their default writing speed, but all of those important little words such as “family” or “day job.” It can take time to get into the flow of writing and when you don’t have a free hour to spare and really get into it, opening your notebook or Google Docs might feel like a waste.

Because it can be hard to see the long-term effects of our most gradual efforts, we (by which I mean definitely me and probably you) often fail to realize how quickly little groups of words and parts of paragraphs add up. If you were to write just 150 words, about one paragraph, per day, you will have written 54,750 words in a year. To put this in perspective, The Giver by Lois Lowry is about 44,000 words.

When I’m writing a story, I like to imagine that I’m chiseling a statue from a massive slab of marble. It doesn’t matter if you plan said story in advance or just make things up as you go along, you start the actual carving part in the same place either way: by hacking away at the stone in front of you. Regardless of whether you lop off five-pound chunks of rock or slowly chip away at the form you’re revealing, you will eventually have something resembling a statue. If you give what little scraps of time and energy you have to your projects, it’s inevitable that you will end up making progress.

If you want to write and the best you can do is a sentence a day, don’t scoff and say you’ll write that one sentence later when you have time to write a paragraph. Write that sentence today, and when you have time to write a paragraph later, you’ll have a paragraph and a sentence.

March 10, 2026 - Launch day for In the Grip of the Ice by Dorraine Bennett
March 19–21, 2026 - Bandersnatch at the South Carolina Great Homeschool Convention
April 9–11, 2026 - Bandersnatch at the Ohio Great Homeschool Convention

Readers are raving about I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry in their Amazon reviews! Check them out or go leave your own (even if you ordered the book directly from us!

Also please follow Bandersnatch Books on Instagram or Facebook!

“The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”
–Agatha Christie