Forced, and I do mean 'forced' myself to write last night

The kids had me busy all day yesterday without a break, since their naps did not coincide. And of course I was exhausted.

So when I finally sat down to write at 10pm, I was almost ready to say “screw it!” and rest on the laurels of my wordcount. Hey, I have plenty of leeway to win Nano, I don’t have to force myself to write every single day!

Except winning Nano isn’t really the point. The point is to write and for me to develop my writing practice again. It’s about writing my novel, not hitting a wordcount. Nano is like the tool I use to get what I want, not what I want in itself.

I thought about the future, and what my saying “screw it!” to last night’s writing would mean in the long run, and I knew it would only be the beginning of not taking my writing seriously. There would be more and more days of deciding I’d done “enough,”and that would then lean to loss of momentum, and soon I would stop writing regularly, and soon I would stop writing my novel at all, and it might never get done.

I have too much work to do to allow that. So I told myself I had to at least write something. A few hundred words, that was all. And when I checked a half hour later I had some few hundred words, but I still had a half hour until midnight, and I thought I could stand another half hour, so I kept writing, and decided I had to get at least 1000 words, which isn’t a minimum for anything, in my book. So I thought I should hit the nano minimum of 1667, and then when I checked I was TEN words short, so I had to keep writing and then the next time I checked I was about 200 words short of 2k, so I decided I couldn’t give up there, now could I? So I ended up writing for an hour and a half and hit 2073.

So there’s my forcing. It’s strange that once you get past your own resistance, it isn’t as hard to hit your goals as you feared it would be.

See more progress on: Do NaNoWriMo