I’ve been sitting on almost 30,000 words of a book for the past year. I know I need to go back in and add some stuff to the beginning and I’m lazy and then have a tendency to edit because I feel I need to reread what I have written so I’m familiar with the material. It’s a vicious cycle.
Tomorrow kicks off NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month.
The point is to write a “small” novel in 30 days; the word count at the end has to be 50k to consider the venture a success.
I’m going to put aside what I’ve written thus far and start out new. Actually, I’m going to write 50k words this coming month but I don’t know what those words will be about. Hopefully I can add 50k words to what I have right now and that’ll bring me closer to the 80-100k I need for a completed manuscript. I should probably shoot for 120k to take into account very necessary edits. Now I’m just depressing myself…
My goal for the coming month is 2k words a day. That’s actually a pretty standard goal and many, many writers achieve that goal.
If you’re not much on the idea of writing a book but you have a blog/website, you might consider participating in NaBloPoMo–National Blog Posting Month. I’ve signed up for that with Taste Like Crazy and Sims 3 Gamer and hope I can complete that goal–write a post everyday for the month of November. There are writing prompts on the NaBloPoMo post for Mons-Fris for the month but those won’t work so great over at Sims. This should be an interesting experiment.
Right now, as I’m writing this in my stuffy SUV that stinks of Sophie breath, NaNoWriMo seems like a walk in the park; 2k words a day will be so easy I might just up it to 4k words a day so I feel challenged.
Something tells me, come next Thursday, I’m going to be cursing the decision to jump into this madness.
I just want to get to 50k.
Five Things To Help Me Be a More Productive Writer
- Take advantage of “wasted” time. I wrote this in a notebook–actual paper and pen, folks–while I waited in the pick-up line for Cara. I managed 347 words in 20 minutes. Not an amazing feat but that’s 347 I wouldn’t have written if I had been playing on my phone.
- Just write. No editing. This part kills me since I don’t want mistakes. This is the reason I will never open a published book of mine. I’ll drool all over the cover but I’d bust out the Sharpie and start making edits if I cracked the spine.
- Writing Sprints. This is assuming the words ain’t flowing. If stuff’s coming to me then I’m not going to stop…maybe I’ll get lucky and get ahead.
- Get rid of distractions. I just downloaded WriteMonkey and I’m super excited about it. Not only can I “install” it on a thumb drive and take it between my laptop and the desktop, it has auto-save, typewriter sounds, the ability to enable a visual progress bar and timed writing. Makes me very, very happy.
- Write down word count goal for that writing session on a Post-It and put that next to my monitor.
I’m thinking about making Tucker create this for me; he’s crafty.
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