Six days; 10,000 words

Writing Wednesday

I set myself the challenge and, after nearly a week, here I am in NaNoWriMo mode, typing away as often as I can to get the word count up. I must confess that the title reflects where I should be rather than where I am. For those who don't know, this is a writing challenge for the month of November, aiming to complete 50,000 words by the end of the month. The six days bit is right...

So what are the pros and cons (so far) of this adventure?

In its favour, it has certainly instilled a little writing discipline in my life. I sneak off to my desk whenever I can and I endeavour to write rather than watch something rubbish on television. (This is not strictly adhered to, as witnessed by my inertia when MasterChef was on last night.) The daily target - 1,667 words - is beneficial, as it can motivate me to keep going just a little longer. All too often I would have given up and had a cup of tea instead.

The writing itself is not of high quality and jumps about wildly from topic to topic. I've been a little stymied by needing to do some research about the places we visited in order to write. I wonder if writing a novel would be easier than a memoir in this regard: at least then you are making everything up in your head rather than searching for accuracy. Then again, even novels have to be placed accurately or they lose their resonance.

The downside is my fear that I ignore the children too much. That period after school when I should be encouraging them to do their homework or feeding them at least one of their 5-a-day is often squirrelled away by the computer instead. My husband gets an even worse deal: I just abandoned him to looking after them for hours at the weekend and he's lucky if his dinner is more than a sandwich!

From what I read Week 2 is the most difficult: it is the wall you have to go through. I anticipate loss of motivation and then despair and then giving up. But that is partly why I've set myself a lesser target than NaNoWriMo would like: to complete 1000 words per day.

And what have I achieved? As of last night, 9,439 words - about five hundred short of top target, but 50% more than my own. Perhaps it won't be so bad after all.