Day 3: NaNo Brings It

By day 3 your word count should be rocking at 5000+ words. I hit my target around 5200something. How are you holding up?
I'll be honest, NaNo tried to throw me a curve ball in Day 3, but I still met the word goal. The curve ball involved my being exhausted and the time already being late at night. For the record, my brain fries easily at night, but rather than being a well rested NaNoLoSer in the morning, I stayed up to get my story on the page. By "get" I mean "extract." It was downright painful to work. Even though I knew exactly where the story was headed and I was enthused about writing this scene, my mind and my fingers were having none of it.

Sentences started to look at lot like this: Elsbethw aited in hte roomunti lthe moon slide out from behind the cloudes,

Me writing late at night is the equivalent of driving drunk through a crowded mall. Bad shit is just going to happen. The beauty of NaNoWriMo, however, is that these horribly typed words, tense slips of verbs, and bad punctuation don't matter. I'll edit the sucker later. What matters is that we know Elsbeth is waiting for the moon in her room. Done. I can fix my dead-brain-typing issues in December.

If you've having trouble with things like this, I urge you to keep going and worry about editing later. So long as the story is flowing/extracted, you're still going to get a first draft of a novel written.


Is your story still headed where you thought it would be going? I'd love to hear about it.

2 comments:

  1. The first year that I participated in NaNoWriMo, I was so consumed with editing that I almost lost track of the story. It is very good advice to wait and you are right - that is what December is for!

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  2. I have the fear of the NaNoLoSer hunting me down. It's like being on a diet and eating the cake. One piece of cake cannot derail the whole diet, one day of missing the word count cannot trash the whole effort because the effort IS the point, not the number. A friend of mine keeps her scale in the trunk of her car for kind of the same reason, but I still want to "win."

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