I’m not a huge fan of National Novel Writing Month* (or NaNoWriMo). Granted, I’m not as staunchly against it as my brother (who’s somehow so far against it that he’s for it, since he spent last November crafting his own entry mocking the contest), but I still don’t like it. I tried one year, but the constant focus on hitting the word count every single day seemed to make writing a chore and I ended up 40,000 words deep in a story that I didn’t particularly like with no way to back out and start over. For me, and for most of the participants I’ve talked to, it was an intense month with every free moment spent on a project that we abandoned on December 1. That’s not to say that NaNoWriMo doesn’t have its benefits, I know people who legitimately liked the experience and it’s great for building community (I met someone through the website who I’ve workshopped a couple stories with), but it’s not for me.
So when I read Stephen King suggest that a new writer should do 1,000 words a day in his book On Writing, at first I dismissed it just another form of NaNoWriMo. But the rest of the book spoke to me so deeply (for better or worse, which I’ll probably touch on in a later blog post) that I felt compelled to give it a try. So I added another notebook to my collection (which I think was at a meager eight back then) and started keeping a daily word count.
Though I’m not nearly experienced enough to make any valid recommendations for new writers (since, in the grand scheme of things, I’m a new writer myself), I think that if you’re just starting out, you could do worse than to try this. It doesn’t take much time, just a few seconds to highlight any new passages that you wrote and use the word count tool, plus some simple addition if you’re working on more than one project. I used to manually count up things I wrote longhand, but then I realized that I was cutting back on writing time so I’d have time to count it up, and cutting back on writing time is never a good thing. So now I just do page count for those. I count editing days by the page too too. You don’t even need to have a goal right away, I find that mine shifts without any conscious effort on my part. I started out aiming for 1,000 words, but after a few months naturally started doing 1,200 on my lower days. I’m averaging 1,700 a night right now, hoping to hit 2,000 by the time I graduate. Of course, counting writing I do for school helps pad my average, but I don’t think it’s cheating. Essays are writing too, and at the stage I’m at any practice helps.
If I were more statistically inclined I would have run some tests on the years of data I have by now, or at least taken monthly averages and seen how I’ve changed over time. Part of the reason I haven’t is because I’m always wary of using writing-related projects to procrastinate real writing, but moreover I don’t think I would learn anything. Just by taking the numbers down I get a better sense of how my own writing habits than I think I would otherwise. I tend to write a lot at the beginning of stories, strain to meet the word count around the middle (with spurts of productivity around particularly exciting parts) and usually finish off with a few 4,000 to 5,000 word nights. I write the least when on vacation or right before or after moving from home to school and back, and the most in long stretches when life is in a stable routine.
Of course, sometimes I wonder why the daily writing log works for me but NaNoWriMo doesn’t. The key difference, I think, is that NaNoWriMo treats writing as a chore while the writing logs treat it as a career. In NaNoWriMo, you have to put all your focus towards this one project in this one month, and after that you get a t-shirt and bragging rights and more often than not forget the whole thing. The writing log doesn’t bind you to any project and doesn’t expire at the end of the month. It just invites you to sit down for an hour and translate something from your mind onto paper. Usually the winds up writing more than you would on a NaNoWriMo day, but it never feels like it.
—————————
*NaNoWriMo is an annual competition/challenge in which participants attempt to write a novel (defined as 50,000 words) in a month. It takes place in November.
No comments:
Post a Comment