Before you get too excited by the title… I haven’t finished my total…. but I have managed to get in from work do all the things I needed to do and then sit down in one sitting to bash out 2004 words and have managed it in less than 1.5 hours. I barely stopped and I did free write – no editing.
It is funny how many inconsistences you find and want to edit when writing this way. Resist!
So now I have broken 33000 and my little graph is proud to have bars just over the average by this point marker line.
Here are today’s STATS
Your Average Per Day 1,740
Words Written Today 2,004
Target Word Count 50,000
Target Average Words Per Day 1,667
Total Words Written 33,068
Words Remaining 16,932
Current Day 19
Days Remaining 12
At This Rate You Will Finish On
November 29, 2013
Words Per Day To Finish On Time 1,411
And of course my top tips:
- Every day feels different – sometimes the writing hurts, sometimes it feels stuck or forced, bottle the feeling you have on the days it gives you pleasure. Spend a few moments breathing in and thinking of how good that feels. It may help you feel better about your write.
- Try not to judge… yourself. Turning off that inner editor doesn’t just mean write without a spell check, it means write without your Gremlins telling you how poor it is, tell them to bugger off and come back after 50K words, that way you will have rid of them for at least the rest of Nano if not well into Christmas and the New Year!
- Just keep going – there is less than a fortnight to go. If you have written everyday you have less to do than you have already done.
- Stay positive – this has really helped me – I have tried to keep thinking of this project as a GOOD experience to have and this has helped not get emotionally run down by the daily task of producing 1667 words.
- Remember how AMAZINGLY awesome you are for even attempting to write half a novel in a month!
awritersfountain 
Good going. And you got through the three day away 🙂
Yes, thanks to a mammoth write yesterday I caught up with the weekend away and the missing manuscript. My plan now is to use half days and weekends to get ahead. I am fully hoping to reach 50K before the 30th (possibly the 29th!) I also need to catch up with the PAD challenge as I need more poetry for tomorrow night’s open mic! 🙂
The joys of being a writer 😉
Exactly 🙂 – at least NaNoWriMo makes the rest of the year feel somewhat easier!
I’m confused. Why turn off the inner editor? And why not go back and edit and revise? This is all necessary to keep writing focused and worthwhile. Otherwise, you could be left with a 50k mess that might be a waste of time in the end due to the massive edits needed.
The whole point of NaNoWriMo (apparently) is that you do just that – switch the editor off, even for spellings. The reason behind this is that editing is a different skill to writing and with a limited time to push through 50K the art of word building and writing has to be the main focus.
Many people DO argue this would leave them with 50K of rubbish, the main focus is the writing practise and what this can do for you rather than what you will do with the writing after. There have only been 3 or 4 top publications from the 200,000 + people who ‘win’ their 50K goal.
It is an alien concept for most writers and a difficult one to stomach.
Editing after writing 50K is a massive task in itself and all too often people lose the plot on paper as well as in NaNoLand… but if you watch some of the Office of Letter and Light Videos or read the information about NaNo the editor switch is well and truly turned to off.
This should allow 30 days of Literary Abandon – where you are free to just WRITE.
There may just be a character or one or two plot twists that make it from NaNo into real work *stories etc. so the concern is not with polish, the argument is they are half written stories that need a lot of work – the counter argument is that no one writes a perfect first draft…. of course none of us turn our inner editor off for a month either… not usually – but then again, what’s usual about Nano?