I’ve hit the mark — 45,094 words — with two hours and twelve minutes to spare. Of course, as Joesph points out in the comment to my last post, is it worth it? I began responding to his comment, and then realized that it warranted a full post, so here’s his comment:
You know, it is very good to have daily or weekly goals in order make sure you continue making progress over time, but I worry that setting an arbitrary goal like 45k by the end of the month, and then trying to cram it in, will just end up hurting your writing.
If you miss your goal one day, or one week, that’s fine, that’s life. The important thing is to keep moving forward, and to make the quality of your writing the highest priority, not the quantity.
Plus, constantly killing yourself on random evenings to reach a goal can actually make you dislike writing, in the same way that most people dislike jogging when they focus on the bathroom scale.
And my response:
I agree — while I hit the 45,000 word goal tonight, if I missed it I wouldn’t be too worried. My weekly/monthly goals tend to be fairly reasonable — 2,000-3,000 words per week, with a monthly goal in the 10,000 word range, only actually require a couple of good nights a week worth of writing (on the good nights, I can pump out a good 1,000+ words) to hit. More important, however, is my goal that I have to write something every night. I’ve had nights where I only push out 100 words, and it takes awhile, but I make myself do it.
The only thing that has really held me back this weekend has been my own attention span. For some reason, after a full day of work, when I come home, I find it fairly easy to concentrate on my writing for a couple of hours. When I don’t have to work, I find it far more difficult to do so — I get distracted by every little thing and find that four hours have passed and I haven’t written anything because I’ve been too busy doing X, Y and Z. Once I hit the groove, it tends to come out in bulk, and if I set little targets for myself, I find it easier to keep going (such as, you can walk the dog for the eighth time in four hours after you’ve written another 250 words).
If the words just didn’t want to come out today, I wouldn’t have pushed them simply for the purpose of reaching 45,000 words — I don’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity. The issue was that the words were there, and they wanted to come out, but I couldn’t focus on what I was doing for long enough to let them out.
Yeah, I wouldn’t worry too much about whether the pace of your writing is negatively affecting your work. You’re just writing the first draft of your novel, and I’ve always been of the opinion that what’s important about the first draft is that one just gets it out and on paper (or on the word processor). The first draft of any piece of writing is only the first stage of a very long process. You’ll have plenty of time to revise the text and improve it.
I like your blog. I discovered it just the other day when I saw that you had linked to me. Good luck.
Thanks — I think that’s part of my mindset — I’m currently somewhere around 20-25,000 words beyond my longest previous novel attempt, and if I get the words out, I can make whatever adjusts are necessary during the revision process.