Today I am thankful for Neil Gaiman.

I wrote 3,000 words today. Which means I now have 13,026 words down, and 36,974 to go. Urk.

I find the micro approach superior to the macro: I need to write 711 words an hour, assuming I write 4 hours per day every day until November 30. I can wrap my brain around 711 words an hour.

One of the cool perks of NaNoWriMo is the occasional pep-talk from well-known writers. Today the latest one arrived in my email, an excerpt from which I will share with you today because clearly the author siphoned the first paragraph right out of my brain:

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That’s how novels get written.

He goes on to share with us the story of how in despair over the pointlessness of his last novel-in-progress, he called his agent to tell her he was scrapping it. Just like you said you’d do with the other ten he’d written and published? asked his agent. So he hung up and kept writing.

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes in to Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Take it from Neil Gaiman, one who knows.

Technorati Tags: writing, National Novel Writing Month, Neil Gaiman

Filed under NaNoWriMo, Writing |