Monday, November 22, 2010

Not cut out for this

Apologies go out to my man Austintatious for saying I'd do National Novel Writing Month for him this year. The goal is supposed to be 30,000 words by the end of the month and after 22 days my word count stands at 4,928, far short of where I should be. My idea was to track my progress on my Twitter, but even that stays mostly incomplete.

Looks like the only thing left to do is just keep working on my story for its own sake. I kind of like where it's at now anyway. Maybe this means I can finally accept myself for the writer that I am, totally incapable of churning out the words unless I feel like it. Which I guess means I'm not a real writer. It's just another thing that I dabble in. Kind of like blogging and music and reading books and basketball and most other things I've ever tried in life. It's a hobby.

Gotta keep working on it anyway. Not much else I can do.

7 comments:

Tracie said...

I thought Nanowrimo was 50K words?

Anyway, like I told Shelly, 5000 words > 0 words. The amount is irrelevant. The important thing is you're writing at all.

Another thing, you don't have to be prolific to be a writer. Do you think about writing? When you read things do you think about the way they were written? Do you analyze movies, books, songs for the way they were written? I think thinking like a writer makes you a writer. And if you even do a paltry amount of writing, that still makes you a writer.

These are my thoughts. :)

Jacob I. McMillan said...

30,000 is the AUSTIN-IZED amount of words. Like the regular amount, but with 1000% more AUSTIN POWER (sorry for the unintentional pun -- I hate that movie).

Anyway, thanks for the encouraging words. Maybe I'm idealistic, but to me a writer is someone who just does it, day in and day out, regardless of how well it's going, like a fool possessed. There have been times when I've worked that way. But I guess it's not necessary.

Wendy McMillan said...

Quality before quantity. I like your new story. I don't fully understand it yet but it's not like anything you've done before. Keep at it!

Austin said...

Hey, I didn't write anything this month, I barely even blogged. I appreciate you writing, and I doubt I'd have gotten that far even if I didn't have this stupid sketchbook assignment to grapple with.

Wendy and Tracie said a lot of the things I was going to, (except imho, Nanowrimo is all about quantity over quality, the quality is supposed to come next month.) Try the final push, you got a week, see if you can churn out another 4,000.

Looking forward to reading this new story, goooooooo Jake!

Amalie said...

yes I tried NaNoWriMo too. I am at 800 words. woot!

Wendy McMillan said...

Amalie I have got to know, what are you working on? Maybe we can expand our book trio to a writing trio.

Jacob I. McMillan said...

I want to do quantity over quality, but it just feels like such a chore that way. Or like I'm doing it for the wrong reasons? Anyway, as of tonight I am now up to 5,575 words. Still as erratic as ever.