Monday 13 April 2015

Falling Behind

Monday 13 April 2015
It's nearly halfway through Camp NaNoWriMo April and I'm 4,000 words behind where I should be to reach my 40,000 word goal in time. I'm not surprised. I shouldn't be. I wish I wasn't. But I am. Life always seems to get in the way of us writer's, or procrastination and lack of motivation. The most important thing though is to not give up.

I've been looking at my little graph I get on the NaNo website. The average words per day for my target is 1,334. The problem is I've had a few days where I just haven't written anything at all, and what I really should have been doing is trying to write at least a little bit of something each day. Even if it's 100 words, it's something.

Then on the Stats page it gives you the words per day to finish based on your current word count. For me, this is 1,592. That's only about 200 more words per day than the original target. And I realised I wasn't in as big a hole as I thought I was. Saying I'm 4,000 words behind seems daunting and impossible. But viewing it as only a couple of hundred more per day suddenly makes it seem achieveable.

So basically what I'm trying to say is (in relation to NaNo and writing in general) 1) not to give up. Achieving something is better than achieving nothing, even if it's not as much as you initially expected to believe. 2) try not to fall behind. If you've set yourself targets, then sticking to them is a really good idea. And 3) look on the bright side. It might not be as bad as you think it is. You can still achieve your goal, you might have just made it a little harder for yourself. But that doesn't mean it's impossible.

M.T.

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