Rob's Surf Report

Surfer Rob’s NaNo: just a little more than bite-sized

Ever feel like you’re not trying hard enough? Have you ever accused yourself of not trying hard enough, and then realized that you don’t care?

That silly Daily Post prompt! Do you know what it wants me to do? It wants me to find an uninteresting news story and talk about how it relates to my life. The problem is, that I find all these stories interesting; maybe it’s because I’m kind of an information whore… But I’m not judging myself, it’s called being realistic. The fact of the matter is, there is no news out there that I don’t find interesting unless it has something to do with sports, and even then I don’t even know how to find sports stories. I mean, I don’t get the newspaper, I have no clue how to Google anything about sports . . .

. . . yeah . . .

NaNoWriMo Day 3
(Photo credit: mpclemens)

So instead of that, I’ll talk about my experience so far with NaNoWriMo! Now, we’re officially eight days into NaNoWriMo and I’m supposed to have something like 12,000 words by the end of the day. I don’t really have that much right now, but the weekend is coming, and I’m going to get in some intensive writing pretty soon here. I’m not beating myself up about it; rather, I’m giving myself enough space to think, enough room to do what I have to do.

To be honest, I was stressing out yesterday. I was thinking about how little time I have to get this done on a daily basis. The daily score is 1,667 words, but you don’t have to meet that on a daily basis. It’s just kind of a benchmark, if you will. This morning I made a spreadsheet in order to track my word count; but that’s just for my own purposes. Seems like everyone loves a tracker these days! Again, there’s no pressure.

And why the enlightened attitude, when I have so clearly set myself upon this task? When in previous years I said I would do it and I never followed through? Basically, because I’ve made some discoveries already.

World War I Daily Mail Official War Photograph...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Right now I am a little over 4,000 words in (which yes, puts me at only about a third of where I’m supposed to be) but I’m already past that point to which I have had it planned out in my mind, for the past four or five years that I’ve had this story in my head. I’ve figured out that when you write past that point where you would’ve quit before, things have this tendency of generating on their own. I mean, here I am, in literary No Man’s Land, and I’ve had a character just appear all on their own… a side character, but nonetheless a character I previously knew about; I have had a mother go out on a selfless goose chase that I never saw coming; I’ve had a father, who I had thought was going to be this, that, and the other… well, I don’t even have him in the story. It turns out that he’s not even there, and I’m okay with that. Why is he not there? Well, we will find out if that’s important.

So in short, this story is now writing itself, and that really excites me. I can’t wait to get up in the morning, make coffee, and sit down and just start banging out some words.

My only issue right now is that I’ll sit down, and I won’t be able to formulate the words correctly. This morning I had about an hour and a half to two hours to write. And I only wrote 400 words. Do you know why? Because every time I wanted to say something I couldn’t get it to come out right. I understand that this is an “internal editor” thing; and that’s something I do have to deal with. I have to get in the habit of getting it down, no matter how it sounds in my head, and moving past that point so that I can keep making progress on this book.

So I’d really like to hear from some of you: we all have these internal editors. How do yours get in your way, and how do you defeat them? Or is it something that you’re still struggling with? Anything goes; tell us about it in the comments.

This post was prompted by today’s Daily Post prompt.

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22 comments

  5. I’m at about 3600 I believe and haven’t added in two days but as you said, the weekends coming. Trying not to pressure myself, I know where the story is going I just need time to write it out. Good luck with yours

    Reply

  9. I’m right there with you, Rob. The words don’t quite come out as I would like them to, but dammit, I’m going to keep going (if I can stay away from the blogging thing long enough!). Ahhhhhh. 🙂
    BB

    Reply

  10. Hope you are still writing —- I’m WAYYYYYYYYY behind …. but for some reason I find this amusing. I haven’t touched the computer in over a week – scheduled a few posts, last week …. I’ve been electronically disinclined so heh —- completely off the word count, and it got in my head a bit yesterday. But today, reading back on some of my blog posts, reading my “follows” etc., I think — “yeah, just keep going, because you were enjoying the process.” What a novel (pardon the pun) idea. So when I finally traipse over to my *novel* and re-read what exists, I’ll see what happens. Internal editorials can be such a pain – excellent self-blocking technique – but try changing the channel. Instead of forcing the idea/words — switch frequencies —- write a blog post – even if it’s only a draft or something you schedule for later — and write in the voice that seems correct in the moment. This may get you to loosen up and be able to flow back into the novel story – sometimes in a few minutes, sometimes longer – but it seems to work reasonably well.

    Good luck and keep on 🙂

    Reply

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