I hate word counts.
This is something that I have secretly always known about myself but generally speaking, I don’t confront it all that much.
I have been confronting it all month.
For a lot of March, I have had Thing 2 just open on my laptop. I’ve mentioned multiple times before that I have the whole plot for this thing just chilling in my head and across various notebooks. It’s all there. But I dipped in and out of actually confronting the document and almost buried my head in the sand.
Part of me figured that it would just write itself and then I would be able to edit it and miraculously I would end up with a book shaped thing that I could actually do something with.
Funnily enough, it doesn’t quite work like that. It’s also a bit annoying if I’m honest.
Because writing is fucking hard.
And I hate it.
But burying your head in the sand rarely works and so I knew I needed a kick up the backside and I decided that I might low key sign up for Camp NaNo. I think I have kind of stopped fucking with NaNo in general because 50,000 words is hard and I have a hard time not struggling with the idea of failure and not hitting that goal always makes me feel low key shitty. But Camp NaNo is different.
I get to set the word count and I can make it as difficult or as easy as I like. The key is for it to be challenging in some way but also not impossible. And I needed to kick myself into gear and actually put words onto the Pages document.
So I set myself the goal of 30,000 words in 30 days.
That’s 1,000 words a day.
Which sounds like a lot, but also is pretty manageable.
Except for the days where it is not.
I started this month with intention of just writing straight through. I was just going to sit at my laptop, try and reacquaint myself with the last couple of sentences before and then carry on writing. That worked for about 5 or 6 days and then I wrote myself the really helpful note of ‘NEEDS MORE’ because I could tell that the scene/chapter that I was working on wasn’t finished but I could not for the life of me figure out where to take it and I feared that I would write myself into a corner than I would never get out of it.
So I moved on because the scene that followed was settling into place in my brain and needed out.
And once I did it once, I opened the floodgates and now nothing is really happening in order. It will be chaos at a later date. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was that I was still adding words. I still getting closer to the overall target with each word that went onto the page and that was all that mattered.
It was all plain sailing for the first ten days and then I just kind of hit a wall. The pressure of it all became a bit too much and then I would just add whatever sentence I could pull from my brain so that I could update my stats for the day and keep my streak. I would then fall into a YouTube rabbit hole and try again the following day. Usually, I find myself getting back on track or ahead of schedule and some of the pressure disappeared.
I kind of operated on that cycle for about a week and then the last ten days hit and I just felt like I was going backwards. I hit 20,000 words on Day 20 (this also brought the document up to 40,000 words) and then was struck with this horrifying realisation that I still had 10,000 words to go.
And at the bottom of that hill, even though it is kind of the final stretch, the whole thing just felt like too high a mountain to have to climb.
Around this time V. E Schwab was answering a bunch of questions because she had just finished a draft and she said that she doesn’t count words she counts time spent writing.
And honestly, that is where I want to be.
I get the majority of my writing done between 4-5pm on a weekday. This is just a fact. I sit down and I write (with the help of Writers Hour). Sometimes it doesn’t go well and sometimes the words just fly out. Really it doesn’t matter what happens, the key is that I just sit down and do the thing.
At this current moment in time, I feel like I am making my sacred hour of writing a murky area that I don’t want to be in because it is taking place under the cloud of me needing to hit a word count each day/for the month.
And what’s wild is that in theory I could actually just call it, amend my word count goal for the month down and then I’ve made it. I can take the pressure off the whole thing and just get back to writing for the ‘joy’ of it. (I use joy so loosely as a term right now because I am being sent insane by this thing right now.) I have done this a couple of times in the past for my reading challenge when I am just not going to reach whatever bat shit crazy target I set for myself. It was fine then.
It would be fine now.
But, but, but…there is something really alluring about ending this month with 30,000 words written and with 50,000 words on Thing 2. The whole point of setting that goal at the start of the month was that it was challenging without being impossible.
Part of me set it at that so that I could well and truly get over myself and accept that this first draft is all about getting it out and not getting it good (this is evidenced by the fact that when I was thinking about a scene while washing my hair I realised I’ve fucked the timeline slightly - I’ll fix it later).
I knew that it would be hard and I kind of knew that eventually, I would want to just stop, but I also knew that I needed to back myself. And so I am at the point where I want to give up and now I just need to move through.
For some reason, the only comparison I can draw right now is to that of strength training. I’ve selected a weight that feels fine at the beginning but the last few reps should feel a little challenging as it’s at that point that change starts to happen (yay microtears in muscles). When the last few reps hit (you gotta keep your form) you sometimes just have to grit your teeth and know that once you’ve done those last 2/3 reps you can put the weights down and step away for a rest.
I just need to grit my teeth for these last few days, let my characters just tell me what the hell they want to do and then come Sunday I can step away for a moment.
Because it won’t be finished by the end of the month, but it will be a hell of a lot closer. And I can track time and not words and everything will be right within my world again.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - There isn’t really much change here. These Violent Delights has finally got its time and so I am reading that. May starts this weekend and I might just spend Bank Holiday Monday reading The Ex Hex - Erin Sterling. Or whatever other romance novel takes my fancy because I have a lot just sitting pretty in my room (it’s an affiliate link)
What I’m watching - Heartstopper really caught me in my damn feelings over the weekend. I loved it. It was so heartwarming. And also be prepared for tears, they caught me off guard and never came when I expected them, but I was an emotional wreck. Oh, I also watched Harry Styles’ Coachella set from weekend 2 because I just forgot to do it last weekend. I am so gutted I couldn’t get tickets to his London show - I need to experience that whole vibe live again.
What I’m listening to - My Apple Music station stays on heavy rotation and it threw out Ambrosia Wine - Madds Buckley, which I quickly became obsessed with and then I discovered that she had just released a whole album, Sunset on Summerville which I am also thoroughly enjoying.
Title Inspiration - It’s obviously The Final Countdown - Europe