It’s kind of random, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re helping me not lose my drive for writing. I’m doing nanowrimo and I’m already worried about making the 50k word count, but then I look at your posts about your novella and how even your word count varies and it’s totally normal to not write the same amount of words every day. Anyways, I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for unknowingly helping me de-stress about my writing.
This ask made some stuff wake up in my brain, and I wanted to repost it here for easy reference in the future, when I need to be reminded. I said:
So first off, I’m really proud of you for doing something you love, even (especially) when it’s hard.
If it makes a difference, I advise you not to worry about making the 50K word count, because the important thing is to be creative, to tell your story, and to push through the challenging parts so you can get to the parts that are fun. I’m relearning this almost daily, while I work on the short story that wanted to be a novella that is trying to be a novel.
It sounds like you’re on your way to enjoying the journey and telling the story, but you inspired me to share some thoughts about my current process and progress:
I have to constantly remind myself that it isn’t about the word count or the number of days in a row that I write (I realize NaNoWriMo is set up to make those things important, but stay with me for a sec). I have to constantly remind myself that this is the first draft! This is the puke draft. This is the draft where all the ideas come out, all the bits fall onto the page, and I just go until it’s finished. We have to remember that this draft is going to have big holes in it. We’re going to come back to it in a month or so and realize that we wrote the same scene twice, or that we had something in our brains that we forgot to tell the reader, so this scene doesn’t make sense. But all of that is okay! We can fix it when we do our second draft, and the second draft is so much easier than the first draft, and almost always more fun.
But! We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we worry about how close to finished the first draft is. We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we judge ourselves the whole time we’re writing the first draft. We’re never going to get to the excitement and satisfaction of doing the rewrites if we don’t let ourselves just WRITE.
So try not to worry – wait, there is no try, only do and do not – DO NOT WORRY about the word count. Some days are going to be epic word dumps (Scalzi does 10K words in a day from time to time, for crap’s sake) and some days are going to be epic struggles to finish with 290 words that we aren’t that crazy about but at least it’s something.
Maybe you’ll get to 50K by the end of the month, and maybe you won’t, but if you focus – wait. WHEN you focus on telling the story and listening to your characters, when you test and challenge and reward them, the total word count is a bonus. But the story, as they say, is the thing.
Keep writing!
If anyone cares, I’m currently at 37970 words on the short story that wanted to become a novella that’s trying to be a novel and still needs a good title. I wrote a thing two days ago that I like. It sounds like this:
“Are you okay? You seem weird today.”
I didn’t seem weird. I was weird. And hormones and pre-teen angst and my general level of constant anxiety were all just wrecking me.
Those two lines capture precisely who I was when I was 12 so perfectly, it’s almost embarrassing and maybe even a little painful to read them.
I’m somewhere in the third act of this thing that refuses to cough up a title. I have two main story things that I need to wrap up, one character thing that I want to put in but don’t need to put in, and then I leave it alone for a day or two before the rewriting begins. It’s equally frustrating and exciting and scary to be this close to finishing the first draft, and that’s okay. It’s a good place to be, practically and emotionally, because it’s what I have to do before I can get into the part where it starts coming together into one whole story, instead of a bunch of things that may or may not hang together.
But, anyway, for everyone out there who is writing a story and feels like they’re never going to get to the end, or that it’s no good, or any of those things our brains tell us to protect us from taking the creative risk of finishing something: you’re not the only one. Hell, I bet even Neil Gaiman feels stuck and frustrated from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that he’s an actual, living god.
So just keep writing until the words pile up around you, because that’s when you take the words and rearrange them into something beautiful.
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Have a great weekend, Wil.
Title suggestion: “You Seem Weird Today”.
Very nicely said! I wrote and published two books, my masters thesis, and scientific papers. Your advice to write something is spot-on. Don’t stress, just write and the words will flow. Accept the fact that we all have to edit our work. It’s a process that one must learn to love, if you don’t already love to write (I do).
I look forward to reading your short story/novella/novel, Wil.
Hey Wil. I’m NaNoWriMoing too. I think I’m cheating on many levels. First, I am a third of the way through my novel already and if I have to, I’ll count all 25,000 words toward the final total. Second, somebody told me it was like 1667 words per day, which to me, seems like the average writer will have a big bag of bruised bananas by month’s end. Anyway, the only thing that matters (other than me finishing this infernal thing) is you giving me the inside scoop when your work is finished. Yes, that’s right, before anyone else. You got to tell somebody first, right? 🙂
I’m nano’ing this year too. I’ve done it six years, but have only hit that 50K once. About halfway through the month, when I get to a difficult part of my book, I always start to think how arbitrary 50k is. But this year I had a change of heart. It’s really difficult for me to finish a first draft because it’s always so terrible. I’m really going to force myself to do it this year, and that ‘arbitrary’ 50k is my motivation to at least get a completed first draft out there. I need to finish a first draft if I have any hope of getting to a second draft!
One of these years I’m going to give NaNoWriMo a try. When I was a kid I used to write short fiction stories all the time, and a part of me misses that creative side. Really excited to see what you have for us when the novel is finished!
A couple of things that help me when I’m writing…
1) Brain.fm or, if I’m offline, Daft Punk’s Tron soundtrack (a good set of noise-cancelling headphones also helps).
2) Having an almost obsessive routine – I go to the same pub, eat the same breakfast, sit in the same seat and then start writing at precisely 8:30am. It’s almost like I’m giving my brain a nudge and saying, “hey, brain… time to be creative!”
Great post: thank you. Word count is never my problem; the crazy notion of getting it right first time, is. You’re advice about the second (and third? Fourth…etc.) draft is really helpful; but also the sense of creative dump in the first draft while the ideas are fresh and coelescing. Not worrying about the plot holes and character consistencies…just getting the people down on the page, giving them life and purpose … Now I need to get that first draft done before Christmas!
Thank you so much for this, Wil. I constantly struggle as I try to get every word just right the first time. This was the reminder I needed.
I love these posts about the mechanics of how you think in order to make progress on what you love. I also try to absorb Seth Godin on creating new things. I’m taking my time because I want to make something I’m proud of.
I am creating simulation code for my PhD, which I will open source, and the one thing I struggle with is the “puke draft”. When I’m writing a paper, or an e-mail at work, I can get myself over the “willpower mountain” by just starting to hit the keys, knowing I can revise, revise, revise my way to success.
I’m in the long dark teatime of the code now. Most days there’s nothing left but the hard part. I have to put fingers to keys and write code that compiles, unit tests, invent that one last thing to make the last week’s ideas work, mathematical correctness…
I’m still trying to find ways to get over that initial hump when you can’t just barf into a .cpp file. Ideas?
I shared this post with my Tweeps, because I know many of them are doing NaNoWriMo, & are likely to get discouraged. Hell, my husband is a writer, so he could use the encouragement! Thanks for saying it, Wil. Just do it. Just write it. Don’t worry about the first draft. Just puke it onto the “page”.
Today I was listening to Tommy Cash and I suddenly had a vivid flashback to reading a Highlights magazine in the waiting room of a Redondo Beach dentist in 1973.
No lie. That’s not normal, is it?
You can’t guard me.
You got more stories than JD got Salinger.
(Name the ref, kids).
Thanks for that post. Don’t worry about the title. It will come to you when your story is whole. When you’re not thinking about. Just keep writing.
The hardest thing I had to learn how to do is gag my internal editor. She was more interested in crafting the sentence instead of getting the story out of my head. 12 years later and I’m still entering Nano and producing books.
Good luck to you. 🙂
I’m not really a writer, though as I get older my family has been pressing me to write down my family history so I have been putting pen to paper a bit and venturing into the waters…..I am very inspired by everyone’s posts here….
The first draft doesn’t matter, because no one will ever read it but you. It’s like putting primer on a wall, it’s all going to be covered up anyway.
NaNo is good for people who need something to jumpstart their writing. Ultimately, word counts aren’t that important, it’s getting the original story down on paper (or computer screen in this case). The good news is that there are a lot of people who took that novel they wrote during the “competition”, polished it, edited the crap out it, etc. and got it published. So never give up on it. Even if you don’t finish it during NaNo, you still can get it done the next month.
I feel your pain about not having a title. I have one novel that it took me about 4 years just to come up with an outline of a title, and another that took about 5 before I came up with one. One will eventually get there, whether its connected with the story or not.
I have titles and no content, so don’t feel too bad 🙂
Nano teaches you two things that really count: The value of daily practice, and how to write like the devil is on your tail and leave preciousness and the inner critic for later drafts. You don’t need to make the word-count to learn those things, but if you do those things, you’ll get damn close anyway, and you are always a better writer for it. Love Nano and have done it many times, win and lose. To my thinking, I always won! Go Nano go!
And, I’m no Neil Gaiman, but I have ten novels up on Amazon and the first draft of the eleventh novel in the can, and every single novel, there are periods where I start thinking that what I am writing is a load of crap and I want to stop writing it forever, but nowadays I just recognize that as an inevitable part of the journey and keep on writing past it.
I’m expatriating to Canada. Bush’s presidency nearly killed me. Trump and the Republican house/senate will take away my meds, and I’ll start having panic attacks and won’t be able to work again. The American people just elected a textbook Narcissist as my president. I can no longer identify as one of them. I feel ill….
Do you have any idea what steps are involved in immigrating to Canada as a working-poor individual? Is it possible? Holy shit.
Thank you, Wil, for this encouragement today, I have a fiction story in my head that has been wanting to be given life and put to paper for a while. Long story short, I am afraid to start. Afraid that my words won’t tell the story the way I desperately want to tell it. Afraid that what appears on paper will not match the beauty in my mind. Afraid I will start and not continue because I freeze with the “bigness” of it all. Afraid afraid afraid…..I need to get out of my own head and take myself and my pen in hand….and DO.
Thanks for the encouragement to start ❤️
Dude.
You are everywhere.
I was watching some vids to try to figure out why people think that these new “always listening” home devices are useful rather than creepy and Orwellian, when a familiar voice issues forth… talking about “when I first began reading Artie’s missives…” (1:32 in the vid)
Hello. How do I get your attention…hmmm….ALL CAPS? I ask only one thing. I ask that you reply, in your own time, so I know these words are not falling on deaf ears.
I’ve never posted to a blog before and I’m unsure if you will take me seriously. I assure you this is daunting task. I’m writing to a writer lol. Are you analyzing my punctuation?
I want you to know that the process of writing anything is an upheaval of sorts. What do we want people to truly know about the way our brain thinks? What do we share and not be judged? How do we share without the fear of being judged?
I’ve written stories, both fictional and fact, of my life and thoughts. There were days during grieving where I couldn’t see the page in front of me through all my tears and snot lol. Other days my hands would be sore from all the angry typing. Pounding hard on the keys as if doing so would translate the depth of my anger to page in front of me. There were days when I’d be laughing out so hard as I write of the funny things I’ve encountered. (I laugh at ALL my jokes btw)
I don’t know what happened to cause you to be grieving. I don’t know why I see your posts on Facebook all of a sudden. I just see a man who needs to walk away for a bit. A couple days of hard physical work to leave you exhausted so you can sleep. I picture you hiking, surrounded by trees, breathing deeply of the cold morning air. Go rejuvenate. Tell your wife where you will be. (She’s the only adult you have to answer too lol)
As I read what I’ve written I realize this was more for me than you. Lmao, isn’t that always the way it goes? Good luck Wil. Find peace.
Sincerely,
Christal
I kind of needed to read this. Thank you for it. Funny how a Criminal Minds marathon on ION prompts me to look you up because I’m avoiding homework and I’ve always wanted to know more about Wil Wheaton anyway. Oh look, he’s got a blog.
Anyway, thanks. My unsolicited thoughts on a title? Maybe “I’m Okay”