Day 23 word count: 34,696
Admittedly, that word count is AFTER I’ve written for the day, but I might write a little more before the day is done.
Anyway. The month is over 2/3 done and the deadline looms! I hit some major fatigue this week and am not convinced I’ll be able to pull my story together before the deadline.
Doing things consistently is HARD
I’ve been pretty proud of myself this month because I’ve stayed on track (or very close to it) with word count. I’ve been enjoying my story and trying to balance between having everything planned and letting my creativity lead me.
And then we got to this week. Friday, I completely lost all motivation. I didn’t write. And then Saturday…I wrote a little ~300 words. Aaaand Sunday I didn’t write either.
Just like that, I’m almost 4,000 words short of where I should be. Turns out, doing something mentally taxing for 30 days straight is really hard and I’m not good at it. If I ever do this again, I’m absolutely going to build in rest days so that I can not write while also not feeling guilty.
Best Advice for Week 3
I had a couple things that drove the little progress I made this week.
Silence your inner editor
It’s so easy to get to this point in a story and decide that it’s stupid. I do it daily. But I keep reminding myself that my goal is to write 50,000 words and make it a coherent story. So it’s allowed to be stupid! And when I’m really struggling, I go into intense detail describing the setting. Yes, it’s totally out of place for where I am in the story, but at least I get words on the page that can be reworked if I ever decide to edit this monstrosity.
Get to the end of the story
I was feeling anxious early this week because my story had gone totally off the rails and I had no idea how I was going to wrap it up by the end. So I sat down and did a little brainstorming and found something that is workable.
I mean, this story is assuming I’ve built certain character traits over time that I absolutely haven’t built, but he idea is to move FORWARD.
Coming up in Week 4
Annoyingly, a lot of the Week 4 stuff in No Plot? No Problem! deals with celebrating that you’re done, which doesn’t really apply to me yet. It also urges you to make time for writing during Thanksgiving, which isn’t really a thing for us this year because of COVID and living in Germany.
So I’m banking on being motivated by the looming deadline next Monday. It’s going to take a major effort to haul my sorry ass over the finish line in the next 8 days. Wish me luck!
