As you may remember, the month of November was NANOWRIMO … aka National Novel Writing Month. I decided to participate this year. I was super energized and excited to begin my novel. With my wide open schedule, I thought I would have plenty of time to knock out a 50,000 word novel. Hell, I might even finish early I thought! I was so wrong.
The couple days of NaNo started out alright. I wrote the requisite 1,700 words each of the first three days. I was on a total roll and things were flowing pretty nicely. It was all downhill from there.
The first weekend in November I found myself driving down to Orange County for the weekend. This was a pre-arranged trip, but I figured I would find the time to write during the day while friends were at work, or on the 8-hour car trip (each way), or at night. Well, I didn’t. My schedule was so crammed with seeing people that I barely had a moment to breathe let alone write 1,700 words a day! And on top of it, when I sat down to write, nothing flowed from my finger tips as it had been the first few days.
I found myself contemplating a story change despite repeated encouraging emails to not change the topic once you already committed a couple thousand words … it would just make it that much harder. I decided to stick with the story, and tried to do some brainstorming since I could not find my writing voice. I came up with a couple of good ideas and was energized to start writing again as soon as my trip was over.
Enter the new job. I started my new job on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011. Already a few days behind in writing, this added “task” in my schedule threw a huge wrench into things. My once wide open, free schedule was now … well … booked! I found myself waking up at 5 to make it to the gym by 6 and home by 7 so I could leave for work by 8. I worked until 6 or 7 at night and headed back to the gym for round 2. By the time I got home around 9 I was beat. It took all my energy just to brush my teeth before I crashed! Needless to say, no writing got done that week, but I was hopefully that the weekend would give me at least 16 hours of writing solitude.
Wrong again. The weekend was crammed with all of the stuff I could not get done during the week … phone calls, paying bills, trips to the post office, going to the bank, grocery shopping. Plus I wanted to have a little fun too, it was the weekend after all!
Thus, I found myself halfway through November with only about 5,000 words written. (Note: for the mathematically challenged, you should have about 25,000 words halfway through November … I had 1/5 of that amount.) I succumbed to my busy schedule, made the decision that for now my desire to write a novel must take a back seat to my new job and my continuation of my developing fitness. It was a hard decision to make, but something had to be sacrificed for my sanity.
I still want to write a novel. I have for a long time, and I will forever want to until I actually complete it, but this year it just did not happen. NaNoWriMo definitely opened my eyes to the novel writing process though. It taught me just how difficult it is to write, even when I love doing it. It is still a challenge. So when you look at all those books on your bookshelf, know that a ridiculous amount of work went into each one.
No comments:
Post a Comment