Phoenix Living

Ok, let’s take a look at this set-up realistically for a moment, this NaNoWriMo deal. Again, not in an attempt to discourage, but you can set yourself much more realistic success goals if you know the beast you’re dealing with.

First, let’s establish an agreement that the idea of 2000 words a day, every day, no breaks or off days, as a long-term sustainable goal is pretty durned unreasonable. Sure, we can all name a writer or two we know or we’ve heard of who writes like that. Similarly truthfully, the number of writers who really and truly do write like that are extremely few, statistically insignificant in number compared to the overall number of writers. So already we recognize that NaNoWriMo as it’s structured isn’t how most “real writers” do their everyday writing.

Next, let’s take a more time-limited example: it’s much more easy to imagine that a writer might need to write 2000 words a day every day for a month with no breaks or days off, especially if they have a looming deadline. This mirrors much more closely the NaNoWriMo structure. However, if you take that crunch time as your model, it would be wise to treat it as such on the other end, and give yourself some time off after the crunch to recover before you try to dive into revisions. If you try to push through and keep working after you’ve just put yourself through a major crunch, you massively increase your burn-out chances. And still, even in a crunch time, even for pro writers, Other Life Events will sometimes crop up at the most inconvenient of times. So this model still doesn’t address how you deal with those inevitable interruptions of routine that even the most dedicated writer can encounter and which can get so discouraging to one’s motivation.

So let’s focus in again, this time on an example on my Facebook feed from someone who forgot about NaNoWriMo and is worried about trying to start such a big project four days late. What are the options available to someone in that position? Well, several!

• You can try to make up the 8K spread out evenly across the month, making your new total only about 267 more words per day.
• You can decide that your personal wordcount goal is 42000, the 50K minus the 8000 words you missed by coming in late.
• You can decide that your NaNoWriMo ends four days later than everyone else’s, and make up the missing 8000 words on the far end.
• You can do four extra mega-writing sessions of 2K each, either all at once(possibly more burnout potential) or spread across four days of the month where you’re feeling more inspired/energetic enough to do 4K instead of 2k that day.

And I’m sure there are even more ways to solve the problem than I mention here. If you’re willing to genuinely assess the situation you have to work with (including your own needs, desires, and motivations that you’re bringing to the writing table), you’ll be able to more easily narrow it down to the solution that best fits your situation. Remember the goal, which is to find reasons for you to keep writing, not to find excuses not to write–those are easy and everywhere.

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