I didn't make my word count goal yesterday. I broke a thousand, but was still over 600 words short by midnight. After being all bummed out, I got over it and went to bed. I'm just having a hard time caring more about quantity than quality. It basically goes against everything in me...I'm working on it, but I dunno if I'll be able to put that part of me on hold for NaNo. And I'm torn on the whole issue. It's good for me to get out of my slow-ass safety zone and move faster than I want to. But am I going to get to the end of November hating everything I've committed to the (virtual) screen?
All right, this sounds whiney and that's not how I feel or what I mean. I'm just...exploring the possibilities here. And that's really all I've got. It's a new day and I'm jumping in fresh. I'm not happy with 80 % of what I wrote yesterday. Not even close. But I'm moving on, cause it gets kinda boring playing freaked-out-writer-up-a-tree.
posted by angie @ 6:21 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Just a few words shy. Keep it flowing.
my darling freaked-out writer,
DON'T THINK.
that's my advice.
i would say give it a few more days and evaluate. we don't want you to come away from this never wanting to write again. like you said, could be the method isn't going to work for you.
Angie, I struggle with that too but often if you don't look at what you've written for a couple of days, you'll find that it isn't all that bad. Lots of times you can just polish it up or at least salvage some of it. I guess I just keep thinking that I can't fix a blank page, so I just keep writing.
I say write for a week, then go back and look it over. I agree that a lot of it will be crap, but a lot of it won't be crap. Nano is impossible because it ends up becoming about the word count. I've seen authors just churning it out, proud as hell they've got x number of words done. Then they post what they wrote.
oh. my. g*d. Better they churned out fewer words and thought a little bit about them first.
There's more to writing than word count. Strive to get you story arc down, with a beginning, a middle and an end. You'll fill it in later, and probably throw out a lot of what you've written anyway.
I swear I'm not whining. Just...looking at the process and figuring out how I feel about it.
But thanks for all the support. Much appreciated. Now to finish putting together today's playlist of booty songs...
I think YOU decide your bottom line--What do YOU want from this month of writing? A complete first draft no matter how rough? Some writing done every single day and damn the numbers? Just some progress on a draft?
It's all good.
IMHO, NANO ought to be a tool to achieve your own personal goal.
BUT I'm happy to be one of your cheerleaders for whatever YOU want to do.
yep.
Everyone's said good stuff here. Advice worth following I say.
For me, I'm using NaNo to get my novel down, but I won't sacrifice quality. I may fizzle out at some point, but it'll be worth it.
However you choose to use Nano is the right thing for you. But then you already know this. So what if you didn't make your wordcount for the day? It's going to happen to all of us. You'll be surprised how much you'll make up on a weekend burn, or a coffee fueled morning.
You don't need to sacrifice anything, quality, your vision for your book. You just need to sit down and get some words in. So what if you don't make 50,000 words? At the rate you're going you'll still have 30K.
The hardest thing for me when I first did it was giving myself permission to write crap and accept that a rough draft is exactly that.
Give yourself props for sitting down and just doing it.
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