bogging Down

Apologies to any readers who don't give a rolling doughnut about madcap novel-writing, but that's sort of what I'm doing and thinking about these days so maybe you can just skip these posts and not hold them against me? I'll become a law student again soon enough, I'm sure. In fact, that's one possible reason I've never made it past about 36k words in any previous year. Starting a novel is easy, and putting the rest of your life on hold for a few days, or even a week, maybe two—that's not so hard either. But at some point, the backlog of work begins to catch up with you, and the focus required to keep a narrative moving becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Thinking back on my past NaNoWriMo experiences, it seems that it was always around week two or three that I really began to sputter, and I wonder if the reason for that was simply that the rest of my life began reasserting itself, demanding attention, and making each word that more difficult to come up with. As I try to juggle the different demands on my time this month, I find my mind pulled in so many directions that when I do sit down to write, it's hard to concentrate, or even remember the story I'm supposed to be telling. Could it be that a month is, in fact, too much time to give yourself for hacking out a really really bad 50k-word novel? Maybe Sui Generis is onto something doing nearly the whole thing in two weeks... Elsewhere: The WaPo featured NaNo yesterday!

Posted 09:10 AM | Comments (5) | NaNoWriMo