A Hard-Won Blessing Disguised as a Problem

[dr_pretentious]

My writing habits are sustainable.

I can write year-round, every day, indefinitely, with the writing habits I have. With the writing habits I have, I make steady, meaningful progress without burning out.

The writing habits I have will not get me to 50,000 words by November 30. I have set myself a goal that requires unsustainable behavior, daily, for weeks. I have no intention of quitting, but I begin to wonder whether I have not made a bad trade I did not need to make.

I am 3276 words behind schedule. Plenty of people are behind now, and lots of people have finished triumphantly in years past who came up from behind. This is manageable, and of course far less oppressive to the soul than grad school was.

The task at hand demands that I break, or at least set aside, my most useful asset as a writer. I don't need to resort to hypomania or hysteria to write, but I need to induce or fake those mental states for Nanowrimo. I have to develop habits that will carry me to November 30, and absolutely no further. I have to risk the possibility that, once all this foolishness is done, I may not be able to write every day anymore, not for some time.

Would this have been easier if I had no writing habits at all? Or sporadic ones? What would this be like, if I actually felt I had nothing to lose?

I'm the kind of fool who can't resist anyway. Any task hard enough that it shouldn't be attempted--or, better yet, actually can't be done--just give me a running start, and I'm all over it. If it weren't for the chronic pain, I might have made a good Marine. Well, I guess it's useful to know what kind of fool one is.

8,393 / 50,000 (16.8%)

Those 3276 lollygagging words had better have their bags packed and their boots on when I come to pick them up.

Today's new words: 1761
Conditions: Longhand afternoon shift at Starbucks, word processor evening shift at home

Comments

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

So in September I started an art class (figure drawing) at the local community college. Always like art, and I've been practicing a lot. Drew through Europe this summer. Practiced on a lot of photos. Love the fact that I can completely lose myself in each line or shade that I draw and not look up for an hour at a time. But class...
We start with gesture drawing. A model walks in the room, disrobes and strikes a pose... for 90 seconds max. We students are frantically trying to turn to a clean sheet of paper, get a charcoal stick out and scrawl a couple lines to try to capture the essense of the pose, then he/she changes to a new pose for 90 seconds. (The sadistic ones only give us 60 seconds.) And this goes on for half an hour. 20 or 30 sheets of paper left, we are exhausted. Capture the shape. Capture the light. Draw the spine, the ribcage, the pelvis. Look at the shadows. Draw with the chalk at arms length from the shoulder. There isn't anything that I've done that I would keep. That's why we do them on newsprint.
But then the model takes a pose and we have twenty or thirty minutes to carefully construct a drawing. We find the charcoal moving smoothly in our hands. We are able to focus on the important parts of the model so that when she/he changes to the next pose we have enough down that we can continue to finetune the drawing without actually having the model in front of us.
That's what Nanowrimo is: gesture drawing. Capture an entire novel in 50,000 words in 30 days? You have to hold the keyboard lightly at arms length and just draw. Find the high points. Look for the contours and exciting places. At the end of 30 days, you'll be ready to sit and focus on finely crafting sentences and paragraphs that you want to keep, and to share. You'll be loose. You'll know where the highlights and shadows are in your story, and you will return to the disciplined art of writing that you knew before nanowrimo. Maybe with something new to add to it.
Sorry for the length of this comment. Now you know how my word count gets so high! :-)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I thought about this analogy a lot today. That's how the first draft of my last book felt while I was roughing it out, and I had some incredibly prolific days back then. Just not every day.

No worries about the length. This was actually a very helpful comment.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

Whoa. Thank you. Thank you so much.
As a former art student, a former artist's model and a current nanowrimo victim, uh, participant, this really makes sense to me.

[annathepiper]

What is not necessarily sustainable for you now might wind up being sustainable for you later. Certainly I have found, this past week or so, that I've been writing considerably more words a day without nearly as much effort than I have in earlier stretches of this year.

Of course, I was dealing with a screwed-up thyroid and I'm also unemployed now, but hey, my point is that if every so often you practice trying to produce a higher word count, perhaps it will eventually help you increase what you can sustain as a writing pace even when it's not Nano time. :)

And if it's any consolation, I'm way behind too. ;)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It is a consolation, though I wouldn't have wished it on you.

Today was a lot easier. I'm starting to get the hang of writing this character. She's got big self-loathing problems, which I hadn't entirely grasped until I'd been writing her for a while. Now that I'm done recoiling in horror, I think I know how to write her in a way that will be engaging to readers without sentimentalizing her as an object of pity.

[annathepiper]

Thanks!

Still have a guest in town and he'll be here until the 12th, so I expect to be behind a while longer yet, though I hope to get more caught up today!

Glad to hear your book's getting its legs under it! And yeah, trying to write a screwed-up character in that way is hard. I have that challenge with Faanshi in Lament.

[seimaisin.livejournal.com]

Maybe your less-prolific habits will be welcome when you finish the month - perhaps, at the end of November, it will seem like a walk in the park to write 500, or 1000 words a day, or whatever your typical totals are.

Whatever the case, as I proved to myself last night, 3000 words or so behind can, sometimes, be an easy (er, or at least surmountable) obstacle to climb. Good luck! :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Could be. I remember the day when, about halfway through grad school, I walked by a couple of freshmen who were crossing the quad the other way. In the tiny snatch of conversation I overheard, they were lamenting O most bitterly about having to write a three-page paper. In a week. I remember thinking, "I could sneeze out a three-page paper."

Congratulations on your glorious word count, by the way. And if it's easy, you can say it's easy. I'm never offended when people claim happy triumphs like that.

[citabria]

Go read this:

Butt in Chair, Butt on the Couch

It's a column by a friend that I suspect you'll very much appreciate, about why spending time writing every day isn't the great habit some people make it out to be.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It's true, the Butt On Couch processes are really time consuming, and there's not a lot of room for that in Nanowrimo. I'm looking forward to having more of that time back in December.

[shakti-lemaris.livejournal.com]

No it's not any easier when you don't have a set writing habit. This was supposed to jump-start me into some sort of habit...I'm about 9000 words behind.