I was on the NaNoWriMo Blog the other day and noticed a couple of interesting trends in overall stats for the 30-day novel writing marathon:
To anyone who has attempted the long slog toward completion of a novel, the latter stat should not surprising. It’s hard for most of us to keep producing draft at a consistent pace for 30 straight days.
The NaNoWriMo model is designed to lighten the load somewhat, most notably by keeping things starkly simple: there is only one requirement – produce that 50,000 word total, period.
But most of us go in with more ambitious goals, and if we don’t seem to be meeting them, it’s all too easy to skip a few days, fall hopelessly behind, then quit.
I came across a post on Fiction Matters the other day that suggests a modest, but effective antidote. It may sound contradictory, but what the author, P. Bradley Robb, proposes is limitation, a limitation that liberates.
The real challenge, Robb notes, is consistency – steady daily effort.
Setting some reasonable limits on what you will produce, then sticking to those limits, leads to consistency. Consistency leads to habit. And once habit has taken hold, it’s progressively easier and easier to pile up those pages.
Sustaining momentum actually takes less out of you than a pattern of starting and stopping will. Thus the prolific Cory Doctorow’s paradoxical remark: “It’s easier to write a novel every year than to write one every ten years.”
In these pre-pre-NaNoWriMo days, this post is well worth checking out.
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