Just 7 days to the start of frenzied typing. Just 7 days to get myself ready for this year’s month of writing dangerously. As part of my preparations, I’ve decided to set myself a daily writing task: 7 bits of advice for myself that are useful during any month. With luck, this won’t be a case of “two would have been enough”.*
Write everyday.
This one’s obvious, which is why it’s first on the list. I’ve quoted Tolkien before and happily repeat myself: “It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
The corollary is that a job frequently interrupted, delayed, set aside, or otherwise unattended to will eventually be forgotten and abandoned. I suspect we delay or give up on difficult tasks because the end point is so far away. It’s a bit like seeing a steep hill ahead of you as you cycle along a road. The climb to the apex looks impossibly steep, and you become breathless before you’ve even begun. You could turn back, but you want to reach what’s on the other side. Then you get to the start of the hill and it isn’t impossibly steep yet, and you keep going, your eyes NOT focusing on the hilltop but just a few yards before you, perhaps even counting pedal strokes, and then you find yourself at the top wondering what all the fuss was about.
NaNoWriMo doesn’t require participants to write every day, but the daily word-count goals (just under 1700, or about 6 pages) make the task seem doable. If I think about writing 50K words (180+ pages) in 30 days, my eyes cross and my computer recedes into a tunnel. But if I write just 6 pages, and then just 6 more — pretty soon I’m looking at a manuscript!
*Nabokov, in a letter to his wife, about T. E. Lawrence’s book.
Lizzie Ross 
Loojing forward to the remaining pieces of advice!
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I meant ‘looking’ of course, but I rather like the Dutch look of ‘looj’ — I might even use it again!
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Pronounced “loo-ey” and meaning a movement halfway between a lunge and a fall.
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Isn’t there a downhill racing sledge called, I think, a ‘luge’? Related perhaps?
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Worth looking up. I hadn’t made the connection.
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Great advice to write every day. The 50K goal of NaNoWriMo looks big, but it looks much better when you chop it down into those smaller chunks, then it looks much better. Good luck with your writing for NaNo!
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Same to you. Is this your first year participating?
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Yes. I’m very much looking forward to it. Of course, I probably won’t be so enthusiastic in the last week of November 🙂 But I think I’ll manage, as writing can be a rush for me.
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However you get there (and even if you don’t), the rush of writing a novel is indeed worth the effort.
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Agreed!
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