Writing Goals: "Pick ONE bird and shoot it"

I'm home from my six-week teaching stint at Hollins and immediately launched into a ten-day grandmothering stint here in Boulder. I have full-time care of Kataleya, aged 3, and Madilyne, aged 14 months, for every day this week while their daddy is off at work. I have all kinds of treats lined up: library story times, splashing in the pool, best-friend reconnection for Kat, outing to the Museum of Nature and Science (with its fabulous new Discovery Zone), and an outing to my favorite place of all, Tiny Town in Morrison (my boys loved it when they were little, and Kat and Madi love it now).

There is only one problem with this: how am I going to get any work done at all, I who adore work, who thrive on crossing items off my to-do list, who can be truly happy only if I have both love and work in my life?

The answer, I already know, is early hours, rising not at 5 but at 4, or even 3:30. Oh, but sometimes, especially after a day of intense family fun, it's hard to get up that early; fatigue accumulates; exhaustion sets in. All I can ever count on is - yes - as the name of this blog attests - an hour a day.

With these new, more stringent time constraints, I have to focus with heightened care on exactly how I use that hour. I remembered this writing advice from Ian Frazier, in his essay in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (edited by William Zinsser). He wrote:

I began with the primise that I wanted to get at least one thing right. My analogy comes from hunting. When you're in a field and a whole bunch of quail go up, if you're a beginner, you put your gun to your shoulder and just go BANG. You see all those birds and you shoot at them all and you won't get one. If you want to get a bird, pick one bird and shoot at it. I've seen films of wolves pursuing a herd of caribou. They will pick one out. The wolf will run into a herd of thousands and will chase that one caribou through the herd - and get it.

So this week I'm aiming each morning to accomplish just one thing, asking myself: "What is the one thing that, if I accomplished it, I'd feel good about my work today?"

Yesterday it was writing for one hour on my new chapter-book-in-progress. My focus was so laser-like that in that hour I wrote all five pages of Chapter Six. (It helped that I had brainstormed exactly what to write on the flights home from Roanoke to Denver.) Today my one task was typing up yesterday's chapter, doing lots of revision as I tapped away on the computer keys. Tomorrow my one task is to complete an author questionaire for the forthcoming paperback edition of Write This Down.

With one fabulously focused hour of work behind me, I can feel good about myself as a writer, and then spend the rest of the day, most happily, on this: