Around Day 8 of NaNoWriMo in November of 2014, I had the worst sense of exhaustion, and my whole body, including every writerly molecule that I possessed, wanted to to just stop writing. It wasn’t as though I’d run out of words, because there will always be more. But it was as if my old, bad habits were pulling on my like inertia, towards a place of no effort. Where I didn’t have to write, and create, and spend time working instead of scrolling Tumblr and youtube and all those other fun places where the entertainment comes instantaneously at the click of a button.
I don’t know if other writers go through this or not, but I don’t think that they do. I’m pretty sure it’s quite the opposite. That all other writers (except for me) spring out of bed in the morning, have their coffee and their breakfast, do a quick workout and then churn out (and I mean “churn” in the best sense) their 1,000 or 2,000 words, or whatever their daily goal is, and around 10 am or so, they bound into the rest of their day, with the heady knowledge that they’ve proved their worth, lived up to their purpose, and saved mankind by the words that they’ve just written.
But me? It’s a struggle pulling against gravity. My only hope for rescue comes in the form of past experience, in that a big push for writing, like NaNoWriMo, comes with a few predictable humps.
The first hump is from around Day 5 to Day Eight. That’s the one with the voice (it’s not a little voice either) that says, “This is ridiculous, what the hell are you doing spending your time like this?” That day was today, so I took myself to coffee at lunch and wrote like a demon.
The second one is going to come around Day 15-ish, the halfway point where a voice (a different voice, but one equally as loud and obnoxious), starts whapping you over the head to distract you from your goal. It won’t matter that you will have, by that time, produced around 30K words, the voice will tell you that you are too busy to continue, and wouldn’t your time be better spent in other pursuits? I deal with this voice by planning ahead rewards of some type, like a 90 minute massage or a day at the spa, but Your Mileage May Vary. Setting up those types of rewards helps me off-set the Voice That Comes In The Middle Of The Month.
The third one is the one that sneaks up on me. I never expect it. It goes, “Look you’ve almost reached the end of the month, you’ve written all these words, so now you can coast. You can just slide over those pesky 4,000 words, and the book will be none the worse for it!” This voice is most insistent and quite peppy as it attempts to assure me how HARD I’ve been working and I should take a break. That I deserve a break.
And I do, or at least I will, deserve a break and a reward and all the coffee I can drink. But as to how I save myself from the Third Voice, is the knowledge that I will let my readers, along with my characters and myself, down, if I don’t go all out. That’s guilt pure and simple, right there, but whatever works. I want my writing to be good, to be something that readers will treasure and that I can be proud of.
Word Count 4/7/2015 – 1,973
Word Count 4/8/2015 – 1,570
Total for April – 15,868