Twelve days in. An arbitrary point to pause and reflect on the progress so far, but I suppose I can glean some kind of significance out of this date and not just because I suddenly realized that I hadn’t written anything for the blog in almost two weeks. But also that.
So, I am nearly two weeks in, and I am behind. At present I am sitting at about 14,000 words. If I were keeping the regular pace needed to hit the 50k mark on the 30th, I’d be at 20k. Why so far behind? I can attribute my lagging to having missed a whopping four days of writing. Two days were given up due to hiking in the Adirondacks, and two days were lost to, well, bad time management this weekend. This tends to happen with me; my confidence gets the better of me and I allow myself a day off here and there knowing I’ll probably be able to make it up later in the month.
How’s the writing going? Eh, I’m getting there. The story I’m working on needed a lot more planning, but that wasn’t the point really, so I didn’t do that and now I’m struggling. My struggles are mostly with strict point-to-point plotting, figuring out where the characters will go next and what they will do when they get there. My other struggle is productivity. My goal is to have my two hours of writing done every morning before 8:30, and yet I don’t think that’s happened once this month. Most often I finish my two hours after lunch. This is almost entirely due to distraction and terrible time management.
There are some positives I am taking from this experience. As I mentioned above, I’m getting to know these characters better. And in discovering who they are, I’m starting to learn to reverse-engineer my plots. For my next writing session I’ve left a note for myself to create the next conflict, then examine how each of my characters would solve that problem, then write it. That probably sounds like what I should be doing anyway, but so much of this fly by the seat of the pants writing ends up being me just moving the players from one scene to the next and inventing the conflict on the spot. Being able to take into account each character’s motivations and personal experiences will help create a scene with more depth and hopefully one that is more fun to read.
Despite my stop and start writing habit, I am seeing glimpses of the writing that occurs when I get “in the zone” and am able to rattle off some 1200 words in an hour, most of it being pretty decent. Right now I’m averaging just under 900 words an hour, which is a solid if unspectacular pace. My mantra with all Nanos is “quantity over quality” and I definitely am doing this to exemplify that in November when I shoot for 75k, but it is always nice to be able to recognize when the juices are flowing, and the juice isn’t all that bad.
I don’t foresee myself having any other days off this month, but then again, I didn’t really expect any this month either. I have never finished a Nanowrimo having written all thirty days. I think last year was the closest I came, only missing one day of writing. I think I’ll get the perfect attendance award this year. But in order to do that and pull off the 75k I need to set myself up for success, which means I need to start planning for the writing to come. “Pantsing” is a perfectly acceptable approach to Nano, but if I want to hit 75k next month, I’m gonna need a plan.
Until next time.
—Dan
Current words - 13916
Avg. WPD to finish on time - 1900
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