You’ve been working hard on your NaNoWriMo novel. You’re feeling pretty proud of your word count. Heh. Look at that loud mouth from the forums, she’s only got 100 words. You showed her. Then you notice that your other friend has double the number of words that you do and your little word stack looks sad in comparison.
Here’s the thing: Some people write faster than others. That’s just a fact.
You’ve got two choices. You can look at the word counts of your friends and say, “What? Bob has 10,000 words more than me? I’ll show him!” and use that to inspire you to write more or you can let it completely depress you and you can quit.
Here’s something you need to know right upfront: there are going to be people with over 50,000 words in the first 24 hours. There are actually going to be people with over 100,000 words in the first 24 hours. Even forgetting these outliers, there will always be people with more words than you.
You can’t let this get to you.
Tell yourself that they are writing grocery store pulp and yours is going for the Pulitzer. Tell yourself that they are making the numbers up (sadly, they aren’t). Tell yourself whatever you want but don’t let it discourage you into stopping, no matter what.
Instead, let those high word counts inspire you to write more. I personally like to find a few writing buddies with similar writing habits to use as “pace cars.” We’re evenly matched enough that they’re never ridiculously ahead of me but they are usually ahead enough that I have to hustle to keep up with them. And when I’m ahead of them, I cackle like a super villain with the hero on the ropes.
Hillary DePiano is a playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer who loves writing of all kinds except for writing bios like this.
Actually this is a great way to look at it. This is my first year doing NaNoWriMo and yesterday I was on twitter and someone tweeted that they had a total of 12,000 words and here I was thinking I was doing good with the 6,350 I had. But I managed to get to 8,040 before I called it a day yesterday.Now I am close to their yesterday mark and they are probably close to 20,000. But I have to give myself a pat on the back, I am doing better than I thought I would. I’m having fun and I like the way my story is coming together, besides I have a handicap… I only type with 2 fingers! LOL Now I really wished I would have taken typing in school! Hope you are having an awesome writing day!
Karen
My college roommate used to only type with two fingers… but she could type pretty fast! 🙂
We’re 4 days in but I just joined today. So is it impossible if this is my Day 1 and I haven’t begun? I’m hoping to pen a few words today. Thanks for all the encouragementÂ
Not at all. In truth, you can do it in a day or two if you really apply yourself. I have a friend that routinely joins the last week and always still wins.
Thanks for stopping by!