The beginning of December marks the end of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for many writers. For those of you who don’t know, writers participating in NaNoWriMo make the goal to write 50,000 words in a month (aprox. 1,666 words/day). I am definetly a goal-oriented person, so you can see how a challenge like this might appeal to me. However, I am rewriting my book, not writing a first draft like most people in the challenge, so the 50,000 word goal didn’t really make sense for me. Still wanting to join in on the comradery, I decided to challenge myself to simply work on my rewrites every day.
Continue reading “On National Novel Writing Month and Playing the Long Game”
For a long time it felt like my paying jobs were always at odds with my writing. I felt as though the two parts of my life were always battling for my time and interest. Both were important and fulfilling to me, but seemed to be in opposition of each other. It often felt like my paid jobs were robbing my creative pursuits, but I was the one organizing the entire heist. The relationship between my jobs and my writing has always turbulent and a bit paradoxical, but over the last few weeks of working more hours than I ever intended, my creative frustration came to a breaking point and the writing slowed to a stop. The jobs weren’t going away and neither was my writing, so I knew that I needed to figure out how to balance these two parts of my life.
It’s been about five months since I committed to writing seriously, so I want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on those five months in this post. In particular, I want to take a look at my ongoing relationship with the concept of productivity and the guilt that goes along with it.
Some of the earliest and most prevailing advice I’ve heard about writing is to do with the importance of reading. Every class, every book, and every writer have had the same advice. It seems to be the one thing that all writers agree on: good writers are good readers. This week the importance of this advice dawned on me.
A few weeks ago I had my first, real experience with making a financial sacrifice for my writing. I couldn’t begin this post without acknowledging the many blessings that do I have (a job, somewhere to live, the ability to support myself, etc. etc.), but I want to spend some time taking about my experience with the financial side of figuring out what it means to be a writer. To begin, I don’t know if I can truly call this instance a sacrifice (I didn’t really give up anything tangible), but it did signal a sacrificial shift in how I think about the future of my writing. That reality check is what I want to get into today.
