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NaNoWriMo so far has been seriously hard work, and will remain so to the very end (and beyond—I’m only a few thousand words away from the 50,000 required word count and am certain my story will continue to at least 70,000). I love taking part despite feeling terrified every new day when I sit down to write. I am learning by doing and have already discovered that, yes, for me to write a novel with determination I need strict deadlines and goals just as I do with magazine articles. Otherwise I get lazy and undisciplined. I lose interest and enthusiasm. I defeat myself because, no matter who gets to read the work and says it’s good, I think it’s shit. Truly. I do. All the time. And, most importantly, I lose my way because I listen to such rubbish.

The hardest thing to do hasn’t been the words. Or the plot. No, the most difficult thing is making sure my inner editor, the total perfectionist, doesn’t get in the way. He’s the one who says everything is shit. Everything. I live with this bastard every day. So, there is no going back, no tweaking yesterday’s output before starting on today’s, no reappraisal of the story so far: it’s just open up the laptop, and start typing from the point where I left things off the day before. It doesn’t matter if my prose is dodgy one day, pleasing the next. That’s subjective, negatively biased for the most part, and I can hopefully make it all consistently good once the skeleton of the plot is out of my head, and work on the second draft begins.

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I managed to write 3,184 words today bringing my total up to 6,055 on day 2 of NaNoWriMo. If you’ve just tuned in, as it were, I’ve got to reach 50,000 words by midnight on November 30th. That’s if my head doesn’t explode between now and then, or my fingers fall off.

I won’t say it’s easy, it never is, far from it—some of today’s prose was maddeningly difficult for me to construct—but the fact that I’m working to a rigid deadline really helps me, always has, always will. I’ve long been able to produce journalistic articles to the required word count and before deadline, so I’m really hoping this month’s experiment will confirm that yes, in all things and in all ways, I really do get my work done better with a proverbial rocket (or broom) up my ass pushing me forward. There’s just no time in which I can indulge my procrastinating tendencies.

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