It’s not easy, but it is worth it…
I can’t believe day 15 is done, and I’m halfway through NaNoWriMo… I stayed up too late again, and blitzed through two thousand words in a slightly delirious state, to hit 25,095 words by midnight of the halfway mark. Hooray!
I’m not sure how much sense they all make, or how many of these words will end up in the book, but I’m making progress, and that’s the point of this writing challenge. To write, without stressing myself out with editing as I go, or worrying about the perfect sentence structure, or even knowing where the story begins and where it ends.
Each of my writing days has covered a different part of my main character’s life – I figure that by the end of the month I’ll have worked out what needs to be in the book and what doesn’t, and will be able to move the chapters around so they make some kind of sense.
I won’t lie, it hasn’t been easy to write 1667 words a day. Many days I’ve wanted to throw my notebook across the room and give up. Sometimes I’d rather collapse on the couch and watch Arrow with my hubby than banish myself to my little purple office and painstakingly type out a bunch of words. There are nights that I get home from 12 hours at the magazines and would rather crawl into bed than force myself to stay awake and type in my hastily scrawled words from the bus, then add some more to hit the target. Most days I would much prefer to curl up and read a book than torture myself trying to write one.
I also spend most of the month thinking that my story is boring, there’s no point, it’s too much effort, no one cares anyway, and why am I bothering… Apparently, according to my hubby, I wrestle with these particular demons with every book, and my doubts seem to increase, rather than diminishing, the more books I write.
But, I do it anyway. I tell the “it’s boring” and “you’re useless” voices in my head to shut up, and force myself to get at least 1200 words a day done (while aiming for 2000 to average out the crappier days). If at the end I decide it’s crap, I can ditch it. Or rewrite until I’m happy with it.
Because it’s only thirty days. Thirty days is nothing. It’s half of one of my workout programs. One moon cycle. Four episodes of Arrow. You can do anything for thirty days. And at the end of that I will have fifty thousand words of a novel, which is way easier to work with and improve than a blank page is…
Life’s short. I want to live it with no regrets, and no excuses. Two years from now will I wish I’d spent more time on the couch watching superhero shows this month, or getting to bed a bit earlier, or will I be happy that I knuckled down and hit my word count targets and had the first draft of my next book finished…
Like most things that are worth doing, it’s not easy, but it is possible, and it is worth it…
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