Is it possible to win
NaNo when you are that far behind?
Well,
let me tell you about my NaNo experience last month. In previous posts, I
mentioned how this year, NaNo was harder for me and I was behind in my daily
word goal. At one point, I was so far behind that if I did not have marathon
writing days, there would be no way that I would cross the 50K finish line by
November 30. At the rate I was going, I wouldn’t hit 50K until mid-to-late
December. Yikes!
My
goal was to write 51,000 words, which comes out to 1700 words a day.
This
is what my daily word count for the month of November looked like (brace
yourself, it isn’t very pretty):
As
you can see, there were 7 days out of
the month that I had written no words! That’s right! That adds up to a
full week of no writing. In a month of only 30 days, only writing for 23 days
puts me at a great disadvantage.
Also,
you can see that there were 5 days where I wrote less than 100 words. You like
that day where I only wrote 13 words on November 8? Yeah, I had a holy crap
moment myself. I was very productive that day.
I
was only ahead of my word count 6 days out of the entire month. The highest
number of words ahead of my writing goal was only 2011 words (November 11).
There was never a time where I was actually “on” target. That means that there were 24 days where I was below my writing goal.
Check
out November 22. I was 9,212 words behind that day. Nine THOUSAND words behind. That’s enough to make anyone cry
buckets and buckets and then quit on the spot. I just sighed, muttered about
what a stupid idiot I was to let myself get that far behind and then had two
marathon writing days back to back (November 23 and 24) where I wrote 12,726
words! HOLY SMOKES! I had never written that much in my life! That definitely
beat out my previous record (on November 9 and 10 of this year) when I wrote
10,061 in two days.
You
would have thought that I would have learned my lesson by then after that
frenzied writing, but no, I wrote ZERO words the next two days (November 25 and
26). By November 28, I was 5707 words behind my goal. I was only up to 41,893
words by that day. Now that was really cutting it close. I couldn’t afford any
more unproductive writing time. I only had two days to reach 51,000 words (or
50,000 if I decided I just could not write the extra 1,000).
I had to buckle down
and I managed to squeeze out 5012 words on November 29 and 4931 words on November
30 (9,943 words in two days). I was thinking about adding another 164 words to
make it an even 52,000 but by 11:20 that night, I was done. I had finally
validated my novel and I just wanted to go to sleep. Thank goodness it ended on
the weekend because I was not moving the next day.
So,
look over my graph again. Do you see how many unproductive days I really had?
Do you see how many days where I didn’t even make my daily word goal of 1700
words, let alone the NaNo daily word goal of 1667 words?
But
I trudged along and pushed myself to finish. I had a strong motivator inside of
me to hit that 51,000 word goal by November 30. And I did it!
So
yes, it IS possible to fall almost 10,000 words behind and STILL win NaNo.
Don’t let a few thousand words drag you down. Just sit at that computer (or
with that notebook and pen/pencil) and write as if you really want it. Because
if you really want it, there is nothing that should stop you from reaching that
50,000 word goal!
Until
next time ~
No comments:
Post a Comment