So, this was an interesting week. It was still a lot of fun, but I definitely had days when I thought to myself:
“I don’t feel like writing today.” Even though I had my killer outline and plenty of scenes I could write, I didn’t want to.
“Why not?” the voice continued. “You’ve got plenty of words in the bank. You’ll make the 50,000-word goal.”
And that was true. But as I’ve mentioned, hitting the word count was only one aspect of my goal. Another aspect was writing every day. And I wanted to stick with that, even when I didn’t feel like writing.
So I did. Two days it was hard and I found myself bored and restless. But I made myself keep going, knowing that what I was writing was very subpar and not caring. It’s about the writing practice, I told myself. Because it is.
What I discovered this week:
- 1,677 words? Sometimes a problem. Those two days when I didn’t feel like writing, I kept checking my word count, discouraged when it hadn’t even hit 500 words. Even setting the timer didn’t help. I just had to slog through. One of the times I hit my stride with a surprising twist, but with the other, I had to force myself to keep going, to just write crap. I managed to go over the 1,677 each time, but it wasn’t easy.
- It’s okay to start anywhere. I’m using Scrivener, which makes it easy to move scenes around. I’ve learned to write each scene as a separate text document so I have that flexibility. So I gave myself permission to look at my outline, review my notes, and write whatever scene sounded fun and interesting, even if it was way later in the book.
- The critic was not always silent. In spite of writing crap and being “okay” with it, the inner critique would occasionally pop up, making snide remarks about what I’d just written. “That’s stupid,” he’d say. “That’s totally out of character for her.”Or “Go back and fix that sentence. It’s repetitive and boring.” I have to confess I had the urge. There were a few times when I did do a quite revision, but it was mostly because a word was so badly misspelled I was afraid I wouldn’t know what it was supposed to be when I went back to it later.
Word count as of Wednesday, November 16: 44,056!!! BTW, I wrote nearly 6,000 words on Tuesday when I was at Rondi’s house doing writing sprints. That’s insane!
