What do most writers considers to be a bad day? For me it isn't meeting word counts as much as it is sitting for hours in front of my laptop, getting down only a few paragraphs, or editing only a few pages when I had planned for 10. I can be so depressing. Whatever the reason, it's easy to be frustrated with falling well-short of a daily goal.
But I've still made progress, haven't I? I'm further ahead at the end of the day than I was when I started. So is that bad? What I want to do here is take the idea behind Doyle's words and mash them with something I've heard Malcolm Gladwell talk about, and that is to not set your daily writing goals so high that you're always disappointed. Sometimes it takes all our effort to get out a paragraph or two in the span of a few hours, and if that's all we can get that day, then that's something to be proud of.
Some days our word counts will suffer, but if we're still putting in a consistent daily effort of time, maybe we should cut ourselves some slack. We can't hit 1500 words every day. So if bad days--days that fail to meet our lofty expectations--are still useful (and I believe they are), than useful days should be considered good ones. And as long as we're putting ourselves in the chair for the time we've allotted to our craft, then maybe there are no such things as bad days.
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