Saturday, November 20, 2010

Motivation, where art thou?

I may have pushed myself too hard these past 20 days.  While I'm still roughly on pace to hit 100k by the end of the month, I'm entering that frame of mind that I've entered around this time the past two NaNoWriMo's, the following questions swarming in my mind.
  • Why the hell did I pick this story?
  • How the hell much longer is this thing?
  • Is anyone going to want to read this when I'm finished?
  • Am I wasting my time?
  • What if I take a few days off?
  • You know, I have other fresher ideas that I'd like to work on instead.  What if I put this aside and pick that up instead?
Since this isn't my first trip to the dance, I know to ignore the questions and keep going.  I remember a Neil Gaiman blog entry where mentions that he goes through the same thing with every book he writes.  Still, my motivation is flagging.  I just have to keep in mind that I'm about 2/3rds of the way done and almost 67,000 words in 20 days is pretty damn good.
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1 comment:

  1. Catherine StineNovember 21, 2010 at 7:35 AM

    You can do it! I've written about 33K words so far, so I'll have to push myself every day until the month's end. But I'm in for the haul.
    As far as authors doubting themselves, I teach Chekhov in my lit class. He literally ran out of the first performance of his play, the Seagull in horror.

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