In pursuit of 50,000: NaNoWriMo 2021, Week Four
It’s alright that I did nothing this week, right?
Photo by @benchaccounting from Unsplash.
“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
I think it’s okay.
I won’t give an updated word count because it’s exactly the same as last week - just over 50,000 words - and I don’t think I accomplished any of the goals that I laid out. And that’s okay.
Everyone always says, keep writing, keep writing, don’t you dare stop writing or else you’ll never be successful and you’ll die in a gutter, etc., and maybe they don’t say it so harshly, but the general message is that you must keep writing because a page full of shitty words is better than a blank one.
Yeah, true. And I’m grateful to have written 50,000 words in two and a half weeks. But I also just wrote 50,000 words in two and a half weeks. And now I’m stuck thinking about a half-planned part three that feels overwhelming to finish and is sitting limply in the abstract portions of my brain, zipping back and forth between lifeless ideas to total destruction.
So yeah, it’s absolute shit at the moment.
I’d expect nothing more than that, to be honest. To expect a beautiful, pristine idea to fly out of me like the golden wings of a mythical bird is rather pretentious. Even the initial idea of TGOFT, half-formed in the minutes before sleep, was drastically different than the version I have now. Even while writing based on my meticulously planned outline, ideas changed. Whole scenes were added. Things I had thought were brilliant, I cut.
All to say, after writing the equivalent of a very short novel, writing 25,000 more words without a detailed outline feels overwhelming. So I’m gonna take a quick break until I’m back home from the Thanksgiving holiday, and then dive back into planning. I’m gonna give my brain a refresh. And then I’ll be back at finishing the first draft of the TGOFT.
Speaking of a first draft - do you want a sneak peek? I’ll be sharing an excerpt from TGOFT on my Patreon at the $12/month tier. See it first there, folks.
