Day 12 of MyPeNoWriMo

Today I hit the halfway mark of the 50,000 word goal! Yay!

Day 12

If you’ve read the previous posts, you read (or maybe heard elsewhere, it’s nothing new) that you should measure more against your own achievements in self-improvement rather than someone else, because you can always find “better” out there and that will just drag you down. What I am seeing with my writing here, and for the last few NaNo, that where I used to struggle to get that 1667 words-per-day done, taking a few hours, I can now, in the span of an hour, hit well above that.

Granted, the first draft of anything is always going to be shit, but I can guarantee even my writing has improved along with the wordcount. Definitely not world’s bestseller good, probably not even salable good, but less-revision better. In the span of a single hour, with the exception of one day in that chart above, I am hitting the +1667.

So, how did that happen?

Persistence. Just keep at it, and you find all the right skills falling into place. I might even be able to go faster if I implemented several things:

Get my hands on a decent headset where I can dictate my words instead of being limited by my early morning non-existent typing skills*.NOT go back and constantly correct the typos the autocorrect misses. That’s a discipline in itself, but I still worry that I may have typed something so egregiously wrong that I won’t know what I meant when I go back to revise. It’s a useless worry, and one I’m trying to get better at ignoring. Now I just save the “go back and correct spelling” for immediately after my session so I won’t lose the context.I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t mention the resources I’ve used, like Chris Fox’s book, 5000 Words Per Hour. I haven’t hit that at all on any occasion but I’m definitely not down on myself because of it (see what I mean about not measuring against someone else?). I didn’t think I would magically improve to that kind of word count overnight, but I have improved steadily, which is the key.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. And if you’ve had improvements to your writing using these or a different method, I’d love to hear about it. Until next time…

*I have excellent typing skills once I get going, but my fingers are lazy first thing with only a cup of coffee. I’ve been typing almost all of my life, starting with my brother’s “Trash-80” from Radio Shack. He taught me how to program in BASIC on it, as well. You know, If… then… go to. I miss that beast.