Salutations, my curious congregation. Today, we're going to be taking a lesson from the tortoise and winning the race at a slow and steady pace. This is probably going to be a short one, but it's something I've been thinking about lately and it's going to be today's blog entry.
TWs: Aside from my usual dose of irreverence, not much. Unless you're the kind of person that is absolutely affronted by the idea of not completely busting your ass every day of your life. ...or offended by the word ass. In which case, I'm not sorry, but honestly you should probably find another blog to hang out in.
Hey, listen. If you write 250 words a day, you'll still get a full 90k word novel done within a year.
People talk a lot about hussling, and I was pretty much in the swing of that too a couple of years ago. And you know what? It burned me out. I'm not pushing myself nearly as hard now and my output is still, quite frankly, stupid. At the time I'm composing this, yesterday was the start of NaNoWriMo. It's probably not going up until, like, the 9th, but this is so you know where I'm coming from at the moment my fingers are to the keys.
I decided I wanted to do 90k this month instead of 50k. I want a decent sized novel. One that's going to look good in print, I decided.
To get 50k for NaNo you basically have to do 1667 words a day every day. To get 90k, that's closer to 3k a day. Honestly? That's not so bad for me, but writing word count is kind of like running. You can't go from nothing to doing marathons, there's a build up to it, and I spent the last month doing that build up.
The important thing is that I'm not actually pushing myself. I write what I can manage to get, then I get up and take a break and do something else, and if I still have words to do I come back to it later. And not only is it okay if that's what you need to do...it's also okay if the amount you can commit to doing every day is significantly less than a thousand words.
And you know what? It's okay if you don't want to commit to a daily, too.
I have a friend who wants to write more in November whose goal is 5k a week this month, and it doesn't matter when they do it, as long as at the end of the week they have that 5k. Steady does not necessarily mean daily.
What I'm saying is, be good to you. Take days off if you need days off. Don't feel like you have to be cranking out thousands of words all the time to be getting anywhere, because even if you're only doing a couple hundred a day, you're still going to get to where you're going as long as it's all on the same project.
That's it. That's where I'm at. That's the blog.
Fortune Favors,
Robin the Red
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