As I mentioned last week, I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. As of writing this blog post I’ve reached 37,000 words in my novel, which I’m quite happy about. I found the first week or so pretty easy to manage, and I consistently went above the official daily word goal.
The last week has been a bit tougher. I set a personal daily goal of 2000 words, and I have managed to hit it every day so far. But it’s been tough at times. Many nights I’ll have only written 800 words or so, and think about just calling it for the day since I’m ahead of the official mark. But part of this month is being disciplined on my own; the official goals aren’t that meaningful, they are just a guide. I want to do this with internal motivation, that’s the real challenge.
One trick, or probably more of a strange placebo, that I have found works is using an app like Forest (or really, just some count-down timer) to do what cool writers call “word sprints”. I’ve found fifteen minutes is the sweet spot for me. I get locked into trying to write as much as I can in fifteen minutes, which is really the length of a YouTube video that’s a bit longer than average. It’s a unit of time I can easily wrap my head around. And in each sprint I tend to get at least 500 words. I then take a short break, and repeat again. I’m not sure why it works, but it doesn’t leave me feeling burned out; I tend to feel more energized in my writing after accomplishing one.
I don’t have much else to say (I’m in the middle of one of those days where I’m at about 1200 words and it’s 9:30 pm) except try playing around with ideas for avoiding burnout. I find that setting up systems to avoid short-term fatigue can be incredibly beneficial in staving off long-term issues as well.