Why Write 1000 Words a Day?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a book project about the spiritual lives of organizations — that’s the background for the podcast I’m always telling you about — and in order to keep that manuscript moving forward in 2020, I tried to write a mess of words every day. And mostly I did.

1000 words a day — does that sound like a lot? It’s not. If you just sit down and free-write and spill out the words, it isn’t very much at all. You can write that much in about 3 pages of 12 pt. font. double-spaced. But if you want to write a good 1000 words, that can take longer.

My book title right now is Why Spiritual Capital Matters or something like that it. The title fluctuates. The daily word count does not.

I’m interested in the ways contemplative practice in organizations can help people stay close to problems without immediately fixing those problems. You know, problems like racism, which also happens to be a constant issue in organizational life today. Diversity Equity Inclusion initiatives proliferate — and so does DEI exhaustion. And with the corporate responses to the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement — well, we’re all wondering how to move the needle, as the saying goes, on racial equity.

I spent a year-plus slow-talking with social entrepreneurs (45 of them), and I’m pretty convinced that they are the pioneers of spiritual engagement, but I’m not sure they or we, for that matter, have thought enough about what contemplative practice and antiracism have to do with each other.

Each week, I circle back and talk to people on the podcast, some of whom were my research subjects, some of whom are just people I found through hanging out in this sector. My hope is that podcasting is a way to sort caffeinate my writing. When I sit down to write 1000 words, I like to have a large mug of coffee nearby. But I also like the feeling that I’m just coming from a conversation that my ideas are not deskbound, that they have a life of their own in exchanges with people who are doing the hard work of running an organization, leading a company, pursuing a mission. I talk to social entrepreneurs, I write about social entrepreneurs, because I believe they are on the front edges of organizational life today. In a sense, we are all running social enterprises these days, whether we’re in academia like I am, or churches or nonprofits or forprofits or what-have-you. We are all compelled to be innovative, to be aspirational, to do things anew.

Here are some of the challenges I run into. Just about every morning, I start off by reading someone else’s work. But then when, I start to write a thousand words, they’re so imitative of whatever I was just reading that they don’t fit into my project. I need to write 1000 words, but they need to be 1000 words in my project. Do organizational leaders run into this problem, too? My research suggests so: a lot of trends pop up and invite organizations to copy or imitate or duplicate what other people are doing. Each day, try to write your own thousand words.

Another problem I run into is that I write 1000 words for one chapter and find out I’m actually working on a different chapter. This isn’t really a problem. It’s a part of the territory when you’re working on a big, sprawling project. But sometimes it’s hard to know where exactly you’re working on your back 40.

Another problem is that some days the 1000 words just won’t come. I’m stuck around 623 words, and I can’t push it forward. On days like that, I’ve found it’s really helpful to pull back and do some kind of whiteboard or some kind of outline — forget the 1000 words and get a 30,000 foot view. Go macro, go meta. Then zoom back down write your 1000 words. Sometimes I find that when I’ve gone meta, I can write a huge blurt of words in 30 or 45 minutes. That macroview fuels the microproduction.

My hope is that come December, or whenever Wipf & Stock churns it out this book, all those 1000-word days will have produced a book you’ll want to spend some time with. There’s a back-and-forth-ness, a mutuality to the work of a storyteller like me and an organizational leader like you. You lead, I write. I write, you read. An admirable arrangement.