This year, in an effort to get myself writing, I have decided to commit myself to National Novel Writing Month, which begins tomorrow. The goal is 50000 words written in November; I’m going to try to top that, and aim for 60000, which is a slightly more proper length for a novel, and gives me a goal of 2000 words per day.
What this means, however, is that I will likely be posting occasional updates on my progress. I will not be posting the work itself, since the goal for the month is quantity, not quality. And if, when done, it turns out good enough to share with the public at large, well… I’d look for a publisher, and it would vanish into slush piles for years at a time.
Now, my purpose in doing this is two-fold: the aforementioned effort to get myself writing more (in this case, “more” being “at all”), and to break me out of many time-wasting habits. If I am to produce 2000 words per day and still get the work I’m supposed to be doing done, then a lot of my online time-wasting is going to have to be cut. Of course, I’m not going to entirely eliminate my online diversions, but rather streamline them.
Thus, for example, rather than checking the online comics and blogs that I read first thing in the morning, and again and again throughout the day, I’ll check in the evening when the updates are most likely to have been made already. That said, I will cut out Wikipedia entirely — apart from novel-related research — so that I don’t get trapped in ever deeper searches of pop culture from my youth.
The hope is that, by the end of November, I will not only have acclimated myself to writing daily (and continue thereafter at a reduced rate of output), but will have also eliminated some of my more egregious time-wasting habits.
I guess we’ll see how it goes.
