Monday, October 24, 2016

4 Lies You Tell Yourself During NaNoWriMo

     With NaNoWriMo just eight days away, I decided to kick off my writing blog's re-activation with a post about the self-same!  Buckle your seatbelts kids, 'cause today I take off the training wheels and give you a taste of what it's like to be a big boy!  These are 4 lies you tell yourself during NaNoWriMo, and the reasons why they're full of shit.

1.  I'll Do It Later

     Mmmmmm no you won't.

     Listen, I know; I've been there myself.  You insist, "I'll do it later, I promise, I swear," and then it never gets done and you fall asleep and wake up the next morning and groan because oh great, now you've got twice as much to write today as you did yesterday!

     Do it now, while you're thinking about it.  You'll thank yourself later.


2.  I Don't Have Time Today

     Honey, it's November, ain't nobody got time for anything.  It's midterm season, it's holiday season, it's family drama season, everything goes crazy in November and you will never have time.

     So you have to make it.  Stick a knife into your day and carve out the time if you have to, even if it's just five minutes here and fifteen minutes there.  Use your lunch break to get some writing done, you can type or scribble or dictate between bites!  Install Dragon on your phone and talk it through your scenes while you're driving home from work, or walking to school, or tip-tap some paragraphs on your ipad while you ride the bus or train or magical flying kangaroo to whatever the hell it is your afternoon is full of.

     Even if you have to wake up at four in the morning to get those 1,667 words out, you do it.  Because the truth is, you're never going to have time, and life is always going to get in the way.  If you want to win this thing, you need to make your own time, and guard it with your life, the way a dragon hoards gold.  You are a word-dragon, and your story must be told.  ROAR.

3.  It Doesn't Matter/It's Not Important

     Maybe it doesn't matter to your neighbor, or your friends, or even your parents or your wife or your kids or your dog.  Maybe it doesn't matter to anyone else in the entire world, but it matters to you, doesn't it?  It certainly mattered enough for you to make the commitment.

     And you're the only one it has to be important to.  Newsflash:  No one's WIP is ever important to anyone except the person writing it until it's been published.  And once it's published it could be the most important gd book in the entire goddamn world, or at least a super important book to one person, which is just as good.  In fact, your book could be the catalyst that changes someone's entire life, and you just don't know it yet because we're three-dimensional beings passing through the fourth dimension as if it were a linear plane.

     But before that book is published, it needs to be written.  It can't be important if it never exists in the first place.  Except for inside you--you believe it's important, don't you?

     Then write it, damn it.

4.  I'm Too Tired/Hungry/Thirsty, etc

     Me too!  I mean fuck, why am I always tired, amirite?  Is it all my medications?  Or the drugs?  Or the alien probe lodged deep into my hypothalamus?  Who knows!

     But dude, my dude my friend my sweet Florida bucket of orange juice, you need to keep going.  Get those words out, comrade.  Pound them out of the keyboard like you never pounded a keyboard before--and I know about the summer of aught nine, so I have some high expectations from you.

     Seriously though.  I know you're tired, and you need your sleep, you're hungry and you need food, you're thirsty and you need thirty barrels of Irish coffee STAT or you won't be able to stand another second of staring at this too-bright screen and oh god now you've got a migraine and you absolutely cannot work in these conditions, can you?

     Only you can.  Get your food and drink and guzzle and chow down between word sprints--maybe you reward yourself with a bite every fifty words or something.  You can multitask.  As for sleepiness, you can write while you're tired.  It may not be the best thing that ever flew from out your fingers, but sure as heck by gosh by golly, words will appear!  And then you can edit them in January, after you've hit 50k.

     You can write tired, you can write hungry, thirsty, achey, breaky, keyboard-hatey, whatever your current mood and physical condition.  It doesn't have to be gold, it just has to be words.

     "I'm too ___" leads to "I'll do it later," and then we're back at square one and nothing gets done!  Just do what you have to do.  Keep writing, and don't stop; chances are good that no one's keeping track except for you, but you don't want to let yourself down, do you?

     Don't sabotage yourself, pally.  When the bomb drops, you don't want to be the only person you can blame--that one's a bitter pill to swallow, and very large, too.  Don't make me shove it down your throat!

     Just get the words out.  You can do it; I believe in you, and you should believe in you, too.