Day 16 - Working out of the mid-month slump

Exert your talents, and distinguish yourself, and don't think of retiring from the world, 

until the world will be sorry that you retire. - Samuel Johnson

You've been pushing yourself hard for over two weeks now. Even if you feel you could have done more, you have made the time to write more than you usually would - and that can be really, really tiring. 

I've seen it a lot during NaNo - it's happened to me during NaNo - the mid-month slump. There's such a long way to go, you're never going to get there and you're tired. 

The best advice I can give you is this: don't stop writing. Don't take a few days off. It's like sitting down after a day of cleaning when you've still got more to go. It's doubly hard to get back up again and keep going. 

Picture the goal. Take a couple of hours to have a bath, watch a movie, maybe even see some of those people you live with whose names you're starting to have trouble remembering. But then get some words on the page - even if it's only a couple of hundred, or a hundred, or twenty-five. 

It's only two weeks to go! You can do it! 

Day 15 - Halfway Point!

If you're going through hell - keep going. 

- Winston Churchill

Day 14 - Our own expectations

Be not afraid of going slowly, be only afraid of standing still. 

- Chinese Proverb

It's so easy to look at the past and say "I could have done better. I SHOULD have done better. I should have written more, or made more time for editing." After all, it's going to take forever to get where we want to go if we don't make optimal use of our time, right? 

Regret and perfectionism can be a bigger drain on our productivity than pretty much anything else. Personally, I struggle to retain a sense of proportion - I've written x many words, which is x more words than I would have written otherwise. Still, it's not what I expected from myself. 

Writing is like life. It's messy, imperfect, full of unfulfilled potential (everyone has that one scene that was just so perfect in their head) and layered with excitement, regret, drudgery and bursts of inspiration. It may not go the way we want all the time, but if you do the best you can during the good times, the bad times can only ever drag you down so far. 

Best of luck for the coming week! 

Day 10 - Guest Post by Emily May!

Today's Guest Post is by romance author Emily May, or perhaps romantic fantasy author Emily Gee. Whatever the name, Emily has seen some brilliant success, with her Regency novel "The Unmasking of a Lady" making the finals in several competions including the National Readers' Choice Awards and the RWA's Romance Book of the Year Awards 2011.

I'm a slow writer.  My happy word count per day is about 1000 words--usually written laboriously over many, many hours. But 1000 words a day is a little too slow when I have deadlines to meet!

Last year I started doing two things that helped me to increase my word count and achieve my writing goals a little more easily. Both are quite simple. They may work for you ... or they may not.

First, I wrote the following sentence on a piece of paper and put it on my keyboard each night, so that I saw it first thing in the morning.

"Take a few minutes at the beginning of each day to set goals."

Each morning I sat down and read that sentence and thought about my goal--"Today I am going to write 1500 words"--and set it firmly in my mind.

(I know, 500 extra words per day doesn't sound like a lot--but it adds up! A 90 000 word first draft takes 60 days, instead of 90--that's a whole month less!)

Second, because 1500 words is a daunting amount for me and can easily drag out over eight or more hours, I wrote down my goal in little chunks, like this, on a scrap of paper:

  1500 words

100 600 1100
200 700 1200
300 800 1300
400 900 1400
500 1000 1500
 

And then I started writing, not focussing on the end goal, but on the mini goals instead. 1500 words was impossibly far away, but 100 words was easy, and then 200, and 300. And with each mini goal I crossed off, I got a nice little boost. I could SEE that I was blasting through my mini goals, which made me feel more positive about my writing, and that in turn made the words come more easily. 

Incredibly, there were days when I reached 1500 words by lunchtime! (A miracle for me.) So then I'd write out more increments of 100 and keep working. Several times I passed 2000 before my brain shut down, and once I even passed 2500!

So there they are, my two little strategies for upping my word count. I hope they work for you too!

Day 9 - The Writing Habit

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. - Aristotle

I try and write every day. Sometimes I only do 100 words, sometimes I do a couple of thousand. More often than I would like, I don't write anything at all. And sometimes, as an unpublished author, it's difficult for me sometimes to truly believe it when I tell people I am "a writer". 

After all, what is a writer without a published book?

That's where trying to write everyday comes in. Writers write. After all, lots of people have published books who I would not necessarily consider as writers. (Did you know Sharon Osbourne wrote a novel??) Publication is a goal, but it's not what defines us. 

We're writers, after all. What defines us is what we do repeatedly. We write. 

Get going people! 

Day 8 - Questions and Cute Kitty Pictures

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer--and if so, why?

- Bennett Cerf

Day 7 - Here's to the Editors

I always wondered why it took so long, reportedly, to write a book. After all, if you can type really fast, you should be able to finish a book every fortnight or so, right?

HA!

To those who are about to edit, we salute you! Just remember the words of Mark Twain:

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.