On Day 7 of NaNoWriMo 2016 I found myself feeling particularly unmotivated but I dutifully sat down at lunch hour and typed out 100 words. I tried continuing but could come up with nothing. Rather than force it I decided I had earned a rest day and would devote myself to thinking about where the story would go next. I had written a little and would still work on the novel, if not directly.
Day 8 coincided with the election south of the border and my lunch was cut short because I needed to be somewhere immediately after. As such I only managed a paltry 124 words at lunch (it sounds more impressive when I frame it as a 24% improvement on Day 7) and when I got home in the evening to find Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the United States (I cannot adequately summarize my feelings about this in a few words but imagine my head tilted to the side and strange, incoherent babble issuing from my mouth and you’re close enough) I found I could not write at all, feeling a near-existential level of anxiety and an inability to focus.
I avoided social media, I avoided the news, I holed up and mentally hid away.
Today I am uncertain of how to proceed. There are a few concrete facts. My total word count as of yesterday is 10,536. To be on par after eight days would require 13,336 words, meaning I have a deficit of 2,800 words. With a strong effort that could be condensed into one extra day’s worth of writing, something that could be knocked out on a weekend, for example. This also assumes that I stay on track today and all other remaining days by continuing a pace of at least 1,667 words per day.
While I surprised myself by getting past an early hurdle with the story–a story I’ve never been enthused about–I am less certain I can do so now after a couple of down days. I debate over whether to plod on (“all writing is good!”) vs. admitting defeat and stopping (“now I can devote my time to something more constructive and/or enjoyable”).
The benefit of continuing is it helps reinforce the habit of writing and that is by far the most challenging aspect of writing for me, more than my annoying habit of switching between present and past tense, more than my tendency to lapse into passive voice, more than my stellar ability to start a story but never finish it. Sitting down and writing every day is essential to instilling the discipline needed to write and it is that discipline that strengthens the writing, that lets me find my voice as an author. It’s why I vowed to post every day on this blog last year (I’ve kept up fairly well on that, though I’ve lapsed, ironically enough, this very month).
If I do stop this story my backup plan is to start work on another but keep the existing word count toward my official NaNo total. I’ve written the words, after all, so they should still count. Technically it’s cheating but in the spirt of writing vs. not writing, I think it’s okay.
The next challenge would be what to write. My choices, as I see them:
- start writing a new story
- continue work on a previous NaNo effort. Even the ones that are technically done still need work or revision and several are still in a DNF state. The choices here are:
- Road Closed (needs revision and an ending)
- The Ferry (needs revision)
- The Mean Mind (revision/ending)
- Weirdsmith (barely started)
- Start of the World (a little further along than Weirdsmith, but not by much)
- continue working on my short story collection, 10 Pairs of Shorts.
- free write 39,464 words of prose
A lot of options, some more enticing than others. I am not going to free write 39,464 words over the next 21 days (though I’d love to see what the last few thousand looked like).
I’m going to mull and commit to something this evening and get back to writing, blotting out (or perhaps infusing my writing with) the completely bonkers results of the US election.
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