So, NaNoWriMo finishes this Sunday, and this is the moment where I start making excuses. In all honestly, I could lie to you all and doctor my word count, but where would be the point? I started this project in order to prove something to myself, so there would be no point lying in these blog posts.
I have not written a single word of my NaNoWriMo effort since I wrote my last blog post.
However, while I told myself that I was not going to go off on a self justification tangent as to why this is, making up excuses as I go along, actually I think it is a useful exercise. Why have I not sat down to write anything?
I feel my failure in the last week is two fold, but one cause directly feeds the other. I’m not lying or trying to assuage my own guilt by saying I’ve been insanely busy. Aside from the volunteering which I have been continuing to do, all of my deadlines for writing and recipe development seem to be coming all at once, meaning I’ve seriously had to slot things in and juggle just to get it all finished and in on time; I’m going away next Friday morning first thing for a week, so I have no excuses not to get my actual work done. That always needs to be the priority. I had one evening off, but I decided I really needed it this week to relax, or there was no way I was going to make it to the end of the week.
An interesting discovery I have made is that when I’m super, super busy my creativity takes a bit of a dip, or as far as my creative writing is concerned, anyway. You know how previously I’ve said that I’m one of those people who always seems to have an alternative reality running in my head, in a whole different world with a cast of characters living out their everyday lives and dramas? I’ve honestly never noticed this before, but it seems that when I’m really, really busy and focusing on everything else, putting 100% into every second of my day, the creative voices in my head go silent. This obviously makes it much, much harder to sit down to a creative writing task. Now, I’m not necessarily saying that this is a bad thing, because it apparently helps me stay focused on the task in hand. But, it has also taught me that in order to sustain my writing over longer periods of time I might need to make the effort to carve out time just for imagining, writing and creating that is separate from my day to day.
We’re at that point now where I know that I’m not going to finish, but I still have a pretty good amount written that I just don’t want to abandon, just because I’ve ended up abandoning my NaNoWriMo effort. Do you remember when I said at the end of week one that my error starting out was that I had not really done any planning going in? I’ve got that week when I’m going away next week when I don’t have any work to do, and I will have no phones or internet to act as distractions. I think it is time to take a look at what I have objectively, and start thinking about a real plot.
Agree with Malcolm. Well done. I gave up before even starting.the moral I assume.
Remember, when you have lost everything else, you are left with experience. And that is the most valuable thing of all. Though of course you haven't lost everything so the saying doesn't really ring true, but you get the meaning and the moral I assume.
Anyway, well done and keep on doing your stuff.
Thanks for sharing,
PabloJ.
Well done for having a go, it sounds as though you have achieved a lot, even if you are short of the magic 50k. It's like the Olympic spirit, it's the taking part that counts. You now have a good first stab at a novel and will have the time and space to review it and see how you can take it forward. You never know where you might end up with it!
Well done.