#I've not finished a Nano goal since 2016! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

infiniteanalemma · 1 year ago

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So, I said I'd do a NaNo 2023 retrospective on the things I've learned over the past month. Here this bad boy is. It took me a little longer than expected, because it's a long, long post. (Y'all know I can't help but write an essay for every little thing!) Admittedly, it's somewhat self-indulgent, but it (hopefully) has some useful information about writing strategies. As per my usual policy, under the cut so it doesn't clog anyone's dash.

Okay, so, to start ... I've been doing NaNoWriMo since 2016, but this is only my second time winning. I also won last year's NaNo, using the same project. I don't want to get too deep into what the project is, as I don't want to kill my forward movement by talking about it before I'm far enough along to get feedback. What I'll say is that it's a visual novel/game script, and I already had a pretty good chunk of content before I used it as my NaNo project.

I'll get more into why that is important later, but for now, I'll just say that I've been writing for a long time and have a long trail of unfinished projects stretched out behind me.

First, though, let me just start with some background information, to lay the foundation of some of both the problems and solutions I've discovered. If you don't care about the background stuff, and are just interested in potential strategies, look for the ** down below.

Okay, I can reasonably say that this November was a whole mess, as per usual. It seems like something insane happens to me every November, and this year was no exception in that regard. Even so, I managed to write every single day of the month except one, which was the day I wound up in the ER. Long story short, my doctor had me try out a new medicine this month and I had a bad reaction to it. (I'm fine, for the record. It took about a week to get out of my system, but I'm okay now.) That one day aside, I wrote every day and on most days, managed to write more than my necessary minimum.

Personally, I'm really proud of myself for pulling that off. As someone with Attention Deficit Disorder (inattentive variant, not hyperactive), it's remarkably difficult for me to form habits and stick with them. I have a huge problem with sticking to something every day, and there's a tendency for me to quit doing something completely if I miss even one day.

I'm also really bad about rewarding myself for success, and I don't get that natural hit of dopamine for finishing my tasks. (Thanks, brain!) This means that even when I succeed, it's hard for me to even appreciate it. Between that and my executive dysfunction, it's hard to stick to doing anything consistently for 30 days. I've had to figure out ways to make myself acknowledge and reward myself for reaching my goals, something I've struggled with for a long time.

Now, part of the problems I've had in the past with completing NaNo was that, in addition to having crazy things happen during November, I've never really had much support in my writing endeavors. I was surrounded by people who thought writing was a waste of time, and didn't understand (or, frankly, care to understand) why I wanted to do it.

As someone who both writes and creates visual art, it's hard to create when people discourage you from creating unless you're actively making money on it. Now, these people weren't trying to be malicious. On the contrary, they were trying to be helpful. They just see things like writing and art as fanciful and unnecessary, a distraction from real things that you should be doing instead. This seems to be a common problem for creatives. Believe me, I've tried relating it back to their hobbies and how they enjoy spending time on doing those things without financial compensation, but somehow my writing and art are different to them.

After a while, I quit trying to explain it to them and attempted to do all my work in (effectively) secret. Combine that with my other problems, and what you get is inconsistent output that lasts only as long as I could force myself to keep going only for myself. As you might imagine, that typically didn't work out well. If I gave up on a project, no one knew except for me, and no one cared except me. Hence, several dead projects and WIPs. It did not help to have other people encouraging me to stop writing and try it next year, only for the same thing to happen again that next year of telling me to quit and put it off again for another year.

Fast forward to last year.

It was a bad year for me in a lot of respects, but somehow, I managed to win NaNo for the first time ever. How did I manage that? It was a combination of things, honestly, but I think it boils down to three main reasons: one, instead of a new project (like I'd tried in previous years), I started NaNo on a project I'd already been working on for quite a while, something which already had a decent chunk of words. (This is the game I mentioned before.) Two, I allowed myself to "cheat" my word count by including things that were related but not directly in the manuscript (working on background lore, codex entries, and such). And three, I told a small handful of others about it who weren't in my well-meaning-but-discouraging immediate circle.

I still did my writing largely "in secret," as I didn't confide in those few other people the idea of what I was doing, only that it was "a writing thing" and explained the concept of NaNo to them. Still, having others know I was trying to reach a word count and being supportive instead of critical did wonders for having me hold myself accountable for not skipping days. Maybe that seems like common sense, but I was so used to having to hide what I was doing or be met with concerned disapproval or condescending amusement at my "fancy" that it was a whole sort of whiplash to meet people who simply thought it was incredible that I could write so many words.

Plus, by allowing myself to "cheat," I did an end-run around my perfectionism, which tells me that if I don't do the task exactly right, I shouldn't even bother to do it at all. Perfectionism (at least for me) isn't just the enemy that tells me every word has to be perfect, but also that the way I do it also has to be perfect. I "cheated" a fair bit that November, and it was incredibly freeing.

This NaNo, I decided to springboard off of last year's revelations. If merely telling others helped me hold myself accountable for my days, this year I decided I would do at least one in-person write-in and meet with other NaNo-ers. (Is that the word? What do we even call ourselves? Oh, it's WriMos, isn't it? ... Honestly, that word doesn't look much better.) I also gave myself permission again to "cheat", and while I did end up doing it one time, I actually didn't really need to this go-round. Merely knowing that I could do it was enough that it took the pressure off for having to get it perfect.

But that wasn't enough. I decided I'd try to push myself even more this go around. (Yes, I know ... some of you can possibly feel the hubris rearing its head, the pride awaiting the fall. We're getting there.) I decided I'd try out a whole bunch of strategies I'd heard or considered, but not yet given a go.

This is where it becomes somewhat relevant that I'd recently been put on a new medication. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the medicine contained a fairly powerful stimulant that is commonly used for weight loss. (That's not why I was taking it, but that information is relevant for what comes next.)

For the first time in a long time, I was feeling good. I had more energy than I'd had in years, along with a brand new ability to focus. On one particular day in my first week, I knocked out over 3,000 words. I was pretty consistently hitting above par, racking up my word count. I was getting those words in, buddy. Things were going amazingly well. It was not to last, however.

Warning: medical stuff ahead, for those who'd like to skip it!

To its credit, the medicine worked. It accomplished what it was supposed to do, which was to help my body use the energy I had and not feel so lethargic, and increase my focus. Unfortunately, it also did some things it really didn't need to do to my body alongside that. I realized in short order that I was having side effects from the medicine, and quit taking it as soon as I realized.

I am an inherently stubborn person when I want to be, though, so I suffered for three days before having someone take me to the ER. Even then, I didn't want to go because I had convinced myself there was nothing they were going to be able to do except tell me I had to wait for the medicine to work out of my system. I told myself I could sit and suffer at home just as well as I could sit and suffer at the ER. It took my doctor telling me to go before I reluctantly gave in.

It's a good thing I did, though, as among its other side effects, the medicine left me severely dehydrated even after the copious amounts of water I'd been drinking. My veins were so shriveled up that even one of the hospital's phlebotomists couldn't find a vein in my elbow or wrist to put my IV in, so they ended up sticking it in my bicep. I was partially correct that they couldn't do anything to get the medicine out of my system any faster, but they did make sure I was at least somewhat hydrated before they let me go.

Okay, hospital stuff over!

After I went home, my body had to crash out and recover. I had to go the rest of November without that extra pep, while also recovering from the side effects. That put me at a low, while trying to keep up writing. I'd built myself a nice little buffer at the beginning of the month, but my jaunt to the ER ate a decent-sized chunk out of it.

Here's where those strategies came into play. I'd discovered a few things I felt were helpful, but I'd been pumped full of energy when I started. Now that I was working from a deficit, the true effectiveness of those strategies would show themselves. Would they still work when I was struggling to accomplish anything, or was my ease at writing purely from the stimulant?

** Here's the list of strategies that ended up sticking with me through the month:

Music - I've tried writing with music before, but I always felt it was a distraction. However, this time around, I tried writing to video game soundtracks -- and this actually worked for me. I think part of the reason it worked for me is that most music in video games doesn't have lyrics, and I think lyrics are a large part of why other music distracts me. However, listening to classical or modern classical music didn't work well to me, either. I think what made the soundtracks work for me is that I largely used music from games that I've played: as a gamer, I've been essentially conditioned to focus on in-game tasks while those tracks play on loop. That translates into writing without becoming distracted. Notably, it doesn't work with video game tracks from games I haven't played. Familiarity seems key, at least for me. This might not work for everyone, but it might work for other gamers.

Writing Sprints - I've also tried these before, and they didn't seem to work in the past. However, I think what made them work this time is a combination of two things: shorter lengths, and consistent rewards. My ideal sprint time seems to be between 10 and 20 minutes. Longer sprints become tiresome, and my attention starts to drift. Shorter sprints make me feel pressured as I try to think what to write, which causes a sort of mini-writer's block. 10 to 20 minutes seems to be my golden mean; long enough to think without feeling the pressure of the countdown, short enough not to strain my focus. Then, regardless of words written, the sprint is followed by a break with a reward. My word counts during these little sprints tend to be somewhat small, usually between 50 to 200 words at a pop, but those add up. Anything that adds words to the count works.

In-person writing events - I'm an extreme introvert, so I don't think I could do a daily or even weekly meet-up, at least not consistently. That said, I do think this helped motivate me. Sometimes it's a struggle for me to socialize, so an in-person event was an excuse to get out of the house and be around people. At the same time, the goal wasn't to have to interact, but for each of us to focus on our writing -- a "social" event, but one where each of us doing our own thing. Plus, everyone at our write-in was very nice, and also pretty small-scale. It might have been a whole different story if I'd shown up and there were a hundred people there. Ours ranged from three to about seven people. Small, low-key, informal -- and with snacks! That worked for me tremendously well.

4thewords - Now, I'm 100% committed to this one yet, as I didn't start it until over halfway through November, but so far, it seems to be working pretty well. I actually found this one in NaNo's resources. Basically, it's a RPG-like "game" where you fight monsters by doing timed writing sprints. I actually wrote this post in 4thewords. You can line up a row of monsters of your choice to "fight" in an uninterrupted stream. As of typing this right now, I'm "battling" a monster called a Kai, which has a 75 word count with a 10 minute timer. Different monsters have different word counts and time limits. As soon as you defeat a monster, it goes on to the next one in your queue until you've reached the end of the total word count. When you win, you get experience and items, which can be used for future battles and/or to customize your in-game avatar. I haven't delved deep into the more gamey aspects yet. There's in-game story lore, quests to complete, and different locations to visit. It also counts your daily writing streak, but only gives you credit for your streak if you've written at least 444 words. I know there are other timed sprint apps out there, but this one does have a whole host of features, all of which are optional. You aren't in any way punished if you break your streak, for example, and there are in-game items you can use to "repair" a broken streak if that's something that bothers you. I don't know for sure that it's something I'll stick with long term, but it does seem to be working for the moment. It is paid, though. There's a 30 day free trial, which I'm still in, and a $4 monthly membership.

Small Rewards - As I mentioned above in Writing Sprints, I made sure to reward myself for meeting my goals, whether it was reaching my daily word count or finishing a sprint. I'm bad about not keeping track of my successes, let alone reward myself for them. As a side effect, it can be hard to see the progress I make. For me, it's easy to only look at the big goals and try to come up with a reward that matches that, but that has historically never worked for me. Forcing myself to stop and acknowledge small successes has been very helpful. I've experimented with a few different types of reward. The small, consistent rewards seem to work better -- giving myself a short dose of social media/discord time for finishing a sprint, looking at video game stuff (new games I'd like to try, game mods, etc.), a little snack for hitting a thousand words. I'm trying to be careful about using food as a reward, especially sweets, because that can be a bad habit to get into. Still, it does seem work pretty well.

"Cheats" - Last year's NaNo, I gave myself permission to cheat a little, and as I said, that helped take a lot of that perfectionism pressure off. So this year, I decided to sort of bake that into my writing strategy. It doesn't have to be perfect. I know that. I've heard so many writing advice gurus talk again and again about "shitty first drafts" and I acknowledge what they say makes sense. (For everyone except me, my brain says.) My "cheats" are really just another way of doing that. I made liberal use of my *Unfinished* tag, allowing myself to skip over things that I just didn't feel like writing and move on. I gave myself permission to leave things "ugly" and repetitive. I allowed myself to just strike out things I was no longer happy with and rewrite it, while still letting that old stuff count as words written. (After all, I did write it. Why shouldn't I give myself credit for it and let it go toward my word count?) Sure, this made my manuscript look ugly, but by doing that intentionally, I managed to sort of shut down the part of my brain that criticizes me for not being "good" enough. I did it on purpose, brain. It's supposed to look that way, so shut it and let me get back to work. And it did.

There are a few other things I'm still on the fence about. I'll keep giving those a try and see how it works for me. In the meanwhile, here's some things that didn't work for me (and why they didn't work for me), but others may find useful:

Scrivener - Wait! Don't pick up your pitchfork just yet! I love Scrivener, and I use it all the time. It's super helpful for me, but -- and here's the key part -- not for writing in. It's a great little tool for planning, background lore, keeping track of important details ... just not so great for me at being a manuscript. If you're on the fence about buying it, I do recommend it. It's got a bunch of useful features, and it makes for a great story bible. But as both a "traditional" story writer and a budding game dev, I don't recommend it as a word processor.

Music - I mentioned music in my strategies that worked, but I'm also putting it here, because I tried new musical things that didn't work, too. I already mentioned lyrics and unfamiliar instrumentals in the previous bit, but another thing I noticed didn't work well for me were instrumental covers of popular songs. I found them in a lot of "study focus" type playlists and gave it a go. While I do find some of them pretty relaxing to listen to, I think the main reason they didn't work for me is that I recognized the songs and still wound up "singing along" with where I knew the lyrics were supposed to be. Apparently, my brain latches on to that familiarity and becomes distracted in the same way songs with lyrics distract me. If you have a similar brand of neuro-spiciness, this may not be the way to go for you either.

Ambient Chaos and white noise generators - Ambient Chaos is such a cool app, and I really wish it had worked for me. To give a little explanation, it's basically a sound mixer for random background noises, each with its own volume slider. Some are ones you might expect, like rain, waves or a coffee shop. Some are weird: beehive, zombie invasion, nuclear siren, alien ship. Others seem pretty counterproductive, like couple arguing, fireworks, marching band or construction site. Still, you can mix and match as you like, and some combinations are actually pretty pleasing to listen to. Like the study focus music, I found both Ambient Chaos and some white noise videos very relaxing, but on this one I'm not entirely sure why it didn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't really like repetitive noise, but it wound up making me blank out when I was trying to think about what to write next. I guess white noise fills up the space in my brain? Who knows. Sometimes the brain just says no.

"Big" Rewards - This is probably going to seem counterintuitive, but in addition to smaller rewards for meeting smaller goals, I tried to give myself bigger rewards for bigger accomplishments. Going out to dinner for writing a certain number of days in a row, buying something I didn't really need but wanted as a treat, that sort of thing. And while I really enjoyed those things, I don't feel like they did much to actually motivate me. Again, this may be the Attention Deficit problem rearing its ugly head once more, but my sense is that those things aren't immediate enough to trigger that reward "conditioning". The smaller rewards were things I could do right away -- immediate gratification. The bigger things took a little more time to set up, and in that time, the effect was lost on me. I still knew why I did it, but that didn't make me want to do it again to any appreciable degree. It didn't hurt, mind you. It just wasn't effective. My motivation level was the same as it had been before the reward, and the monetary cost wasn't really worth it to be a viable system to continue using to motivate myself.

As always, I don't think any of the strategies that didn't work are actually bad, for what it's worth. They just didn't work for me.

If there's anything I've learned in my now years of writing, it's that writing isn't so different from the other skills we have to hone with time. When we first start out, we try all kinds of things, hoping there's some magic method or tool that will make everything work. Unfortunately, the one and only method that works above all others is doing the thing, repeatedly. Everything else is just polishing and refining that. In one way, that sucks because it never really feels much easier. In another, it's sort of reassuring that, if you keep at it, you will get better.

Anyway, this is probably long enough. It's late here, and I'm tired. This post was as much for my own benefit as anyone else, as it helps me to write things out so I can really examine it, but I do hope it proves helpful to someone out there.

#nanowrimo #nano 2023 #about writing #writer stuff #ia personal #ia rambles about...

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finnlongman · 3 years ago

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If you don't mind me asking, as a writer, is there anything you do to motivate yourself/stay focused on one particular idea/project? Like, keeping yourself from having another idea mid-work and having an "ooo shiny" moment, and leaving the old work to be an Emer to the new idea's Fand (to make a clumsy Ulstsr Cycle joke)? I've been trying to get a bit more serious about writing recently and this is an issue I've been running into. Thank you in advance if you do answer this ask.

I always have multiple projects in my brain, but I generally have a one-track mind when I'm actually working on things. It's why I'll obsessively edit a novel in three weeks and then go back to doing academic work -- my brain won't let me do both at once, so I have to give them all my focus for a short period of time and then switch.

I'm trying to get better at juggling multiple things, but it's still my weak point. This summer, I had to split focus between two novels, a thesis, and an article, all in the space of about 2.5 months. The result? I completely abandoned my thesis, and indeed, any academic work, for the whole of August, in order to focus on fiction, because the deadline was more urgent. Sometimes you have to prioritise, and knowing you have to switch tasks at a certain time and that this one has to be finished first does wonders for making you focus.

However, if you don't have deadlines and if nobody is expecting you to hand anything in, it can be a lot harder to do the finishing part, and it's easy to go off chasing new ideas. I think we've all done it. For the first 10 years of writing fiction, I didn't have any deadlines either except those I gave myself, and I definitely abandoned projects and hopped around. Even since I signed with my agent, there's been at least one project I had to put aside unfinished and I don't know when or if I'll come back to it, though that was less a case of being distracted by something else and more a case of being too depressed to write. If it had been under contract, though, that would have been more difficult! So I'm glad that it wasn't.

Part of the way I avoid it is by writing fast. This is unhelpful advice, because either you write fast or you don't, and if you're not a speedy writer, it's probably not very useful as a tactic. But if I write fast enough, not only do I not give myself time to get bored, I also have the drive of knowing the sooner I finish something, the sooner I can move on to something else. If it's only another 3 weeks of work, there's less a sense of the new idea being impossibly distant. I always leave first drafts to stew for at least a few months before I edit them, so once they're done, hopping between projects is a good thing -- as long as I got to the end first. But not getting to the end can be a killer.

I also try not to take breaks while writing first drafts. Again, doesn't work for everyone, hasn't always worked for me. But the books where I take days/weeks off while drafting are the ones that are hardest to finish, and every time I've stopped long-term and said I'll come back to it later to finish it ... I never have. If I ever do, I'll have to rewrite the whole first half before I can continue. This is partly because I'm not an outliner, so first drafts are precariously balanced in my head and setting them down can mean losing sight of something crucial. If I had a set outline to follow, it might be easier to dip in and out.

Having said that, I do have some books that have been written far more intermittently with lots of days off... but they were definitely harder. The continuity and speed is a fairly crucial part of maintaining my train of thought. Like I said -- one-track mind. That's why it's so hard for me to balance multiple projects.

Over time, I've learned that ideas are really the easiest part of writing, but they often don't go anywhere. I keep note of them, often in my phone, but an idea is not a plot, and it takes time for them to turn into a book. I like to let them mature on their own for a while. I knew I wanted to write TRWTH from about 2015, but I didn't draft it until late 2018; I knew I wanted to write a Bisclavret retelling since about 2016, but didn't draft it until late 2019. I gave them time to figure out what shape they wanted to be in before I started actually working with those premises directly. So that can help me resist the temptation to jump on something new -- it's not necessarily ready yet. Writing it down feels like scratching the itch ("I'm not ignoring it, I'm just setting it aside") and means you won't forget it, but also means by the time you come to look at it again, you have a better sense of whether it's worth writing.

Having said that, I'm easily distracted by the temptation to *edit* something other than the book I'm currently working on; I'll reread an older project and see how to fix it and since editing doesn't require the same single-minded focus (for me) as first drafts, I can be lured away quite easily. Deadlines are usually the main thing that helps there.

If I'm honest... deadlines in general are the only things that keep me on track. Otherwise I'm always hopping between things and never focusing on anything long enough to get it "finished". It's where things like NaNoWriMo can help: setting yourself a goal of writing a certain amount of a book within a window of time can often keep you on target long enough to pass the point of no return (i.e. the point at which you're more invested in finishing the book than in starting a different one). I never finished anything until I did NaNo for the first time; it turned out what I needed was a deadline and an excuse to write quickly.

Two final things. One is that I try to only write things I really care about. If I'm ready to abandon a project and never come back, I probably wasn't invested in it in the first place. Two, if an idea is constantly popping up while writing something else, it might be related. It might explore the same themes, or develop on one of the ideas. It can be worth poking at it for a minute to check if that's the case, and if it is... it's not a new story. It's a new part of the story you were already writing, and can be woven in.

It's possible absolutely none of this is applicable to those with a different writing style to me, and it's also incredibly rambly, but quick summary:

deadlines help. knowing someone is expecting something from you helps.

writing fast enough not to get bored gives you less time to get distracted.

ideas need time. write them down and let them stew instead of rashly chasing them; they may not be able to carry a whole story on their own

they may not BE a whole story; consider whether they're part of what you're already writing

Did this make any sense at all? I have no idea. I've actually been switching between three projects (two fiction, one academic) this week, so my brain is utterly melted because, as I said, I suck at doing that.

#writing #answered #oddnub-eye

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