Here’s a speech I regularly give to people who ask about how I spend my days as a writer:

The writing life is different from other professions. We writers could never write for a full day — it’s just too taxing. We have a tough time just sitting down and writing, and we rarely get in more than a couple of actual writing hours (read: billable hours) per day because the act just takes too much concentration and energy.  (Here’s where I sometimes lay the back of my hand against my forehead.) It’s tough being us.

Turns out… I’m completely full of crap.

I was listening the other day to a piece about Mark Twain and his writing habits. He went to work writing in the morning, spent all day at it, and returned in the evening. Stephen King writes 10 pages a day, even on holidays. Ernest Hemingway wrote 500 words a day. Writers, at least those who make a living writing, WRITE. All the time. Thousands and thousands and thousands of words, some of which are complete crap, and others that turn into something phenomenal.

Writers like King and Twain seem to me as a mere mortal writer to be fearless word wranglers. With such prolific writing, they must not be afraid that the writing is not perfect the first time out. They must not fear a missed plot or a badly developed character. They must trust that with all their words, things that are good will rise to the top.

In contrast, I am a cowardly, conservative writer. Truth be told, I write most of my work for my clients in one sitting, one draft. I don’t write a thousand words to pick one hundred for publication. If I need 100 words, I write 92 and celebrate being a concise writer. I think I’m fairly lucky that my first drafts usually come close to the end product, but I think this skill makes me a lazy writer, especially when it comes to my own creative writing projects.

So what would happen if I sat in front of a typing instrument for 6-8 hours a day and just produced words? Well, I’ll let you know. On Saturday I’ve signed up for a 6-hour writing marathon through the San Diego Writers’ group. It seems illogical that I would pay $100 to sit for 6 hours somewhere else to write, but I want to change my venue, change my writing style and just let the words flow. For one day in 2010, I want to write like Mark Twain — fearless, without an inner critic, with fingers flying. I’m going to work on the mystery novel I started last January, before I got the nonfiction book deal.

If you took your own fear out of the way, what could you accomplish this month and into 2011? How can you break out of your own habits, bad or not, to tap into new areas of your brain, new stores of your creativity?