NaNoWriMo: Week 2
Oh, we know it's here... It's like, almost flawlessly, Sunday of the second week rolls around and everything comes to a screeching halt. The first excitement has worn off and now you're stuck with a poor excuse for a story and 3 more weeks of stretching what little plot you have into a full 50,000 words. It's painful, almost in the literal sense. It hurts your brain to push out the plot you have buried in there... If you've been watching my profile, (or my progress report) you see two days where I haven't done anything and it wasn't even planned for ahead of time like Election Day was. As of this post, I am behind... To finish, I need 1669 words a day instead of the balanced 1667. As of this post, I have 18,000 words instead of my goal of 22,000 by Day 11. So what am I doing instead? Writing a blog post!
Here are a couple of tips for me as well as any of you folks who are idly reading my site because you're not writing your story, either... First off, never read what you wrote. That's a bad idea. Not only will it waste time, but there's always the chance you'll change (or worse, ERASE) what you've already done and if you start doing that, chances are you'll reduce your word count and that's horrible for morale, especially in Week 2. It's hard to read back over what you've said and cringe in your chair, but that's what you can't do! At least not until after you've finished. It's a rough draft... It's supposed to be ugly! What you do with a rough draft is not use it as a whole, but only harvest little snips and rearrange them into something far more coherent.
Another tip I've come to realize... Never stop when you're blocked. Bad idea. Probably the single worst thing you can do. You write and write and write and hit a snag and decide to take a break. Bad! You will take a break, start doing something fun, and then remember that book you're trying to write. You'll think about starting it up again, but then remember that you're stuck and that you haven't figured out a way to get around it... If that happens, you're in trouble. It takes a massive amount of willpower to overcome something like that. That's why I'm missing two days in my charts. I stopped on a mental block and started doing fun stuff like watching Heroes first season and all sorts of stuff like that... Luckily, I don't have a block at the moment and I'm about ready to dive back in. My goal for today is 22,000, but that's 4,000 more words, so I'm going to settle for 20,000 and then make up for it tomorrow and get back on track. Once you hit 25,000 words, trust me, it gets a lot more fun again.
So that's that... They say it's a good idea to write for 20 minutes or so, then take a 10 minute break, then dive back in for another 20 minutes. "Word sprinting" I guess is what they call it. I would suggest listening to the WriMoRadio episodes they churn out every couple of days. It's a breath of fresh air... It's comforting to know that thousands of other people are having the exact same problems you are. And by exact, I'm not exaggerating, either... They all have EXACTLY the same problems. It ain't just you... It's a fact of novel-writing life that you can't get around. You run into plot problems and character problems and you start thinking it's crappy and you want to quit... For days like that, I try to remember that JRR Tolkien felt the same way about Lord of the Rings. (And I swear I bring this up every NaNoWriMo!) Tolkien hated his story and repeatedly wanted to just give up, but CS Lewis kept pestering him to finish it... And once he managed to get it published, it was a huge hit that nobody has been able to top.
So get to writing!