The Kurosawa Guide to Daily Writing

You don’t have time to finish your book.

Sure, when you started out, you imagined endless hours dedicated solely to banging away on your keyboard, producing The Next International Bestselling Novel. Now that reality has set in, however, you’re realizing that there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Between work, family, and social obligations, how can you be expected to find a minute of free time?

As writers, it’s important for us to write every day. The business of everyday life outside of writing can make it difficult to schedule time to get some serious writing done. You know you should be working on something, but you don’t feel like you have time to make any real progress. By utilizing the Kurosawa Method, you can finish your current project, no matter how little time you think you have.

The Kurosawa Method was developed by world-renowned writer and director Akira Kurosawa. He came up with a strategy for writing every day, no matter what. No matter how busy he was, he made a commitment to get down at least one page every day. One page is better than no pages, after all. This method works wonders. It’s easier to put your butt in the chair with such a small goal, and one page often turns into two, three, or ten before you know it.

Writing just one page per day is the ideal strategy for finishing your current project while juggling a busy schedule. All you have to commit to is a single page per day. If you write more, great; if not, that's fine, too. Writing a single page per day leaves you with 365 pages at the end of the year, which is certainly nothing to sneeze at.