How To Go Whole Hog on a Big Scary Writing Goal
Stop undermining yourself when it comes to goals, and improve your failure/follow-through rate
I struggle with follow-through. Maybe this is your story too. Four months after starting the project, my half-bath remains half painted. I have good intentions. I have the skills — and when I don’t I’m good at researching and teaching myself (what my friends in education would call “self directed learning”). But none of these things include the tenacity to take on a big project and not get distracted by little things along the way — some shiny lures, some squeaky wheels, some just the result of plain old exhaustion. But I’m also a fiction writer. And every October, as my neighbors slowly start turning out their Halloween decorations, I turn introspective — is this year the year I write a novel in November?
That is the basic premise of NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a self-directed challenge whereby the writer commits to putting down 50,000 new words into a novel draft in a single month. There are many off-shoots (e.g. do creative thing X every day in November) and caveats, the most relevant of which are that the novel does not have to reach The End in 50,000 words, and that in November you don’t edit, you just draft — editing is for later.
