NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month and is held every November. It’s a challenge to write 50,000 words of a novel in thirty days (or 1,667 per day). Writers and wanna-be writers come together with a common goal to write novels, short stories, memoirs, whatever it is they’ve been putting off or need a push to get started. This year I decided I would document my daily writing practice as I strive to finish a draft of a novel I’ve been taking far too long on.
Day 4
Words Written: 1861
Total Word Count: 7,060
Goal: 50,000
Surprise, surprise, I woke up early again today. But I was less than looking forward to writing. I don’t know if I was tired or just unmotivated, or maybe the fact that it was 5AM and I just wanted to go back to sleep, but I was not in the mood. I had to really work myself up to get started. But once I did, I was really writing. I wrote over a thousand words almost instantly. It went by in no time and I was really excited to get all of my writing done early and start on other things, especially because I had no child care today and my husband was busy for most of the day.
But then… I died. The last 800 or so words dragged on. I was looking at the word count constantly, thinking there must be a mistake because I must be writing more than five words every few minutes.
I took a break, had some more coffee, meditated and… I wasn’t really in any better spirits.
At about 1500 words, I thought about stopping for the day. By this time by kids were waking up and I was just sick of sitting at the computer, seeing the word count stay the same. So I let it go.
I decided that at 1500 words, while I was still below my daily word count goal, I was still ahead for total days because I had gone over a little each of the previous days. So I really thought about just leaving it for the day.
But after tidying the house, hanging out with the kids, going out for breakfast, and running errands, I came home and decided I would try to finish. Again, at first I didn’t think it was going anywhere. I wrote about 50 words so slowly it was agonizing. But then I pushed out another 250 and was finally finished.
Even though it was a struggle I’m happy with the work I did (not necessary the quality but a first draft is never really satisfying). But because there were so many times I felt like stopping but I still pushed through, I’m extremely happy.
Until tomorrow,
-Mackenzie
