EndoWriMo

Day....Written....Wordcount

1..........0..................0

2..........0..................0

3..........4209...........4209

4..........227..............4436

5..........1802............6238

6..........0..................6238

7..........0..................6238

8..........3439...........9677

9..........0..................9677

10........0..................9677

11.........0..................9677

12.........0.................9677

13.........0.................9677

14.........0.................9677

15......... 3193...........12870

16.........0.................12870

17.........3061...........15931

18.........0.................15931

19.........0.................15931

20.........4133...........20064

21.........1944...........22008

22.........0.................22008

23.........6422...........28430

24.........0.................28430

25......... 2626...........31056

26.........0.................31056

27.........8239...........39295

28.........0.................39295

29.........8015...........47310

30.........7439...........54749

So, here's the summary of my NaNoWriMo stats, taken from my official NaNo stats on the site -- three big days at the end. This table isn't quite accurate (although two of the last three days are), because I was NaNoing on a computer that doesn't have internet access, which saves me being interrupted by the ping of emails landing in my inbox, a great distraction, particularly if the writing's not going so well. So, for example, the first three days I wrote every day. Most days I did something, though sometimes it was only a couple of hundred words. The stats are also out because sometimes I updated after midnight. I mean, really, when does a session end at midnight? I did have a couple of days where I wrote till I was so tired I didn't make sense anymore -- one time I realised my sentences were no longer coherent, and another they were individual coherent sentences but had no bearing on the sentences before or after them, so I had a sequence of sentences with not only no logical progression of thought but no one thought in common! At this point I left them and they were included in the day's count, but then deleted the following morning, so there were words I had to make up. (And, yes, the NaNo rules are you don't edit or delete, but I always do. I know I'm not alone in that. Horses for courses.)

So, the crazy month is over, and I'm left feeling excited and very much "in the zone". That's what I love about NaNoWriMo, sometimes I hate it, and it's hard, and I ask myself why am I doing this crazy thing to myself, but when I get to the end, I have something substantial to work on, and it's amazing to have done it and been part of it. But some days . . . some days, to use a cliche, it really is like getting blood out of stone. Some days the blank screen is god and it dictates there shall be no inspiration, but countering that is the NaNo dictation: thou shalt write regardless of whether thou feels inspired or no. And so I put my head down, bum down, and plough on, plough the most rugged of fields, hating every moment, every word that comes out mired in crap, hate it, hate it, hate it. Less often are the gifts: days when inspiration is there for the taking and the story flows. I could have wished for more of these, but it's good for all of us to know we don't have to wait for them. I always remember hearing John Marsden talk about the days when the writing was agony and the days when it was gold (not his words, but I can't remember exactly how he put it), and I asked if he could tell the difference in quality between the two, and he thought about it for a little while and then said that no there was no difference in quality. That was a particularly enlightening and liberating moment for me.

The whole NaNo thing -- the loving and the hating it is my relationship to writing really. Sometimes I love the first draft, but mostly I don't. Mostly it's hard work. For me, the pleasure is in the rewrites, the editing passes. The reimagining. The redescribing. The fleshing out and the cutting back. NaNo gives me something to wreak my pleasure on! To take my pleasure from. It's hard but exhilarating and hard and fun and hard and hateful -- look at all those zeroes -- and hard, most of all, but it does say something about the power of deadlines. At least my stats do. There were times when I thought I wasn't going to make it, but I remember last time I did it, two years ago, when I really had to pull some big numbers and thought that I could do it again if I had to. And I did have to. More often. But I did it, and never mind that my husband had to cook dinner every night and no cleaning got done. Writing got done, and that's the main thing.