Thursday, November 15, 2018

NaNoWriMo, a Wall, and Plowing Through

Photograph by Rob Schreckhise

By David Nemeth

Tuesday night I wrote only 26 words. Twenty-six words is not a lot for one day's work especially when one is participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The issue could be lots of things but 26 words, that's an issue in itself. Over the last couple of weeks, I posted my daily word count and total word count and when I got to 26 words, man, did I want to lie. I so wanted to post fake numbers, maybe add a 1 and 0 in front the 2 and the 6. It wouldn't have looked that bad. No one would be the wiser. But I decided to go with the real number thinking it might motivate me some.

And it did. My work has me consulting at a new company so as I'm ramping up, getting my laptop, badge, software and user accounts, it gave me time to think about what the problems could be. I do have a completed outline, one or two sentences describing the scenes of the book which begins with the death of the protagonist's father and ends a few days later hours after the funeral. As I was writing throughout November, I finally came to a brick wall of 26 words. So as I spent Wednesday downloading software and rebooting almost a dozen times, I realized that the time period was too concentrated. So I added new scenes, edited some old ones, and spread it out over ten days. Will this time expansion work? Who knows? Who cares?  Maybe this change will give me the freedom to continue to keep on writing and finish it, whatever it will be.

Words written on Wednesday: 1,720. Total words: 27,231.

1 comment:

Scott D. Parker said...

You are more than halfway done getting to 50,000. And believe me: I have hit my own brick walls, too.