When I was little one of the first mental challenges my
parents set me was learning how to count. I'm guessing that your early
education was similar. "One, two, three, four, come on baby…" Eventually
I got to be so proficient at it that I didn't even need to take my shoes and
socks off.
These days I'm a master at this counting lark and can easily
get to a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. It gets pretty boring after a while
but I can count almost as well as that guy off Sesame Street now. In fact I
wish I could write as well as I count. Words flow from me when the ideas are
there and my fingers are pretty adept at typing, but I still don't do it as
quickly as I'd like. I used to say that my target was to write a minimum of a
thousand words per day. A thousand words, that's approximately a page of a
glossy magazine or maybe four pages of a paperback novel. For someone who's
trying to make their living from writing though a thousand words per day isn't
quite enough. I need to be able to double, triple that amount or more.
You may have heard of something called NaNoWriMo - National
Novel Writing Month. Hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists around the
world (so maybe it should be InterNoWriMo?) try to write the first draft of
their novel, end to end, through the thirty days of November. That's just a
first draft, nothing polished, nothing that I'd want anyone else to read. For many,
that will be enough. Others won't make it that far. But some of us will use it
as a springboard to give us the impetus to start and even finish our novels.
However many drafts it takes to complete after November, it's NaNoWriMo that
starts it off. I did it last year and the result was my novel, 'The Happiest
Workplace on Earth.' This year I'm using
it to kick-start that book's sequel.
As part of the project you're encouraged to hit a daily
wordcount. They suggest 1,667 to give a total of a 50,000 word first draft. I'm
there or thereabouts at the moment. But I can't get my head past that 1,667
being a very arbitrary figure. And why is the first draft 50,000? Why not
60,000 which would be 2,000 words per day? That's much closer to a 'proper'
book length.
Or how about writing for a given length of time rather than
measuring the output? After all those 1,667 words could just be 167 repetitions
of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'. Nobody says it has to make sense.
And it's not something that I'm beholden to. Life, taxes, doing my accounts and
watching Pointless all take
precedence over work. I mean I try to get the words done but sometimes
something important steals my hours. That's fine, it will always happen, but
the problem comes when the time thief is something that's not really that
important, like Candy Crush Saga.
That's when working somewhere with no internet connection (like my local coffee
shop) can come in so very handy.
Right, I'd better crack on. Time or words, however you
measure my output, it's not as much as it could be today. And anyhow, I've just
got to take a few minutes out to try and complete level 103…
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