Diary of a Lunatic Part 3 - by Tiggy Johnson [03.12.2010]

I’ve heard the second week of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is the most difficult. The novelty has supposedly worn off and you start to realise how difficult it is to maintain the amount of writing required.

Well, week 2 was fine for me. It was the third week when things changed.

I’m not sure it had much to do with maintaining the output, though I can’t really argue about the novelty having worn off. I spent a lot of that week wondering whether I even cared anymore. Whether I wanted to finish. Whether I was simply over it.

When you’re in the situation, it’s impossible to work out an answer, or at least a timely one, and time is of course the key. I tried to keep writing, at least a little bit, because then, I’d be in touch if I decided I wanted to win. Not that I wrote a lot. By the end of the third week, the statistics suggested that if I kept up at the current rate (average words per day), then I’d finish on December 8th.

I hoped that by forcing myself to write enough to stay in touch, I would care that I was falling behind. And I did. A little.

Instead of choosing simple ideas from my list that I could whip up into a few pages, I was choosing ideas that, well, I’m not sure what they were, but they weren’t word crunchers. They were poems that were destined to be short. They were stories I didn’t care about after four paragraphs, or they were essays that lost focus and I didn’t have energy to bring them back.

So suddenly, instead of punching out between 800 and 1300 words every time I sat down to write, I was tapping out 200, maybe 500, tops. It was going to take a lot of extra ideas to make it home at that rate.

Still I wasn’t sure I cared. I was tapping out a few hundred words each time. Falling further behind.

I tried to think of NaNoWriMo as a cheap, fast-track course, an excellent way to learn about myself. Which it definitely is. I thought about how I was handling writing under pressure, and other than not being able to work out what I wanted from the month, I was fairly happy with the answer to that. Not that it was a surprise. I’ve always written well when there’s been something due the next day. Most of us can do this. Of course, I was more than happy to be getting in some good non-fiction practice. As I’ve already said, I feel I have the most to learn in this area.

On the 22nd, I became aware that if I didn’t put my foot down, it was going to become too late to catch up. I only had three actual writing days left, plus evenings, and almost twenty thousand words still to write. I decided that if I didn’t make some kind of decision, it would be too late.

I decided that the following day, a Tuesday, a writing day, would be my decider. To date, I’d not written more than 3000 words in one single day, but if I was going to have any kind of chance, I had to punch out 4000 that day, preferably 5000. And similar again for the other two writing days, and decent attempts in the evenings of the others.

The following day, I had a new idea. With the end of the year approaching, there was no reason I couldn’t write some blog posts that I wanted to write but just wouldn’t have time for in December, when I was actually moving interstate. You know the posts, the type where the year is somehow summed up.

So I did that. Then I wrote another. Then a poem. Then I wrote an essay sparked by a poetry reading I’d been to the previous night. Then I saw someone on twitter saying they needed a push. So, we raced for a forty-five minute period. We also agreed to ‘meet’ again in the evening for another race. I made my 5000 words that day. I was still a touch behind the generic goal, but not by much. But I knew that if I could do it once, I could again, on my next writing day. Confidence.

Suddenly I was excited again. I had new energy. I was sure I would knock enough words off to win. Then it occurred to me I’d already run out of end of year blog post ideas, and that if I was going to have another cracker day, the inspiration was going to have to come from somewhere else…

To be continued at www.tiggyjohnson.blogspot.com

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