Word count: 2,030
Remaining words: 47,970
Feeling: I wrote too much exposition and not enough of the story. The ideas were there and I wanted to get them out. I was also guilty of editing quite a bit. First day jitters, I hope. Once I get into a better flow, I will stop worrying about style and grammar and substance, and start barfing on the page. Trust me, I’m a big fan of barfing. It’s just that it takes a while to find the sweet spot when I stick my finger down my throat. I was stuck at about 1,000 words. I forced too much. I was afraid to make things happen. Luckily, tomorrow is a brand new day, with another 2,000-word goal. Oh joy.
Word count: 2,078
Words remaining: 45,892
Thoughts: I realized I wasn’t enjoying myself with yesterday’s writing. I tried to change that today. The name “Ashken” reminded Julie of Ashton Kutcher. While this pained me greatly, I did like the name “Ashken” when I thought it up, and since I like to pretend Ashton Kutcher does not exist, Ashken stays. Sorry, Julie! (Although, now that Julie told me this, every time I type Ashken, I think of Ashton. It hurts me physically to admit this.) I have nothing. I thought today I would enjoy this, that the story would begin to flow and characters would reveal themselves. Instead, I brought in uninteresting characters to do uninteresting things. Isn’t it nice to have a place to waste words? Too bad these words don’t go toward my count. I could write thousands of these. Now, if I can only write a few hundred more of the other words, I can call this a day. Two days and my anxiety levels are increasing. I can’t wait to see how I am tomorrow. Things improved when I wrote past the thousand mark. I went back and filled in all the holes I left in my earlier writings. Sometimes it’s easier and more efficient to flesh out a scene than to write a new one. Now, if I only knew what the next scene entailed.
Word count: 2,097
Words remaining: 53,795 (6,205 words in)
Feeling: I know it’s terrible. The writing. The story. The typing. But that’s what this is all about: writing lots of terrible things. This is one of the reasons I put a lock on the writing. The less people that read the first draft, the better I’ll feel—irrespective of what I’ve said in the past about not caring about my non-existent audience. The last half was easier, faster. The not caring about the writing and the not editing certainly helped. I really wanted to get my characters out of the house—but it wasn’t to be today. Until tomorrow.
Word count: 2,298
Words remaining: 41,497 (8,503 total words written)
Thoughts: I don’t know how many times I had to remind myself that this is only a first draft today. It wasn’t that I edited—I’ve outgrown that nuisance. It’s just that I can’t stand how terrible my writing is. I know it’s bad when I’m writing, but I keep putting one word in front of the next, taking the steps that I know bring me closer to my Marathon goal if not my real goal. I spend most of my fantasies on imaging rewriting my old stories, turning them into something they’re not. Okay, enough procrastinating. I’ve found the secret to word output: write on a computer with flaky internet access.
Word count: 2,253
Words remaining: 39,244 (10,756 words written so far)
Thoughts: I wrote a few lines, particularly some of the dialogue, and felt like sticking an ice pick into my eyes. I somehow resisted the urge and left the words in to increase the count for the day. I started late but found the words rather easily. Action scenes seem to eat them up rather quickly. Shakespeare none of this will ever be. Okay, so I deleted the disgustingly horrible dialogue. It was terrible. Truly terrible. You’re probably asking yourself how it can be worse than what’s currently there. Trust me, if you read it, you’d probably go blind. I’ve done you a favor.
Word count: 2,314
Words remaining: 36,930 (13,070 words written so far)
Thoughts: It was difficult starting today. I lost some momentum after yesterday. An inner part kept telling me that I’m wasting my time, that my story is valueless and hopeless, and if true (and it’s hard to argue that it’s not true), why would I bother continuing with it. And to that inner part I responded by typing, as I do each day, the “Word count:” and “Words remaining:” headings, knowing that at some point today, I would fill them in and post this. My inner part does have some interesting points. This is not the time, however, to analyze those arguments. That’s for December. It was a struggle getting any of these words down. I did have a direction, thanks to a discussion with Julie about my story. It felt good telling her the story (she is a bit behind on the reading). She made a few suggestions, and I took them. I realized with her help that it was time I moved the story forward. I knew what had to happen, but I was too lazy to make it happen. It’s not that I had any feelings one way or the other (with this bad writing, how can anyone have feelings?), I was just tired of this whole scene and I wanted it done with. Today’s mantra: write to the goal, write to the goal.
Word count: 2,296
Words remaining: 34,634 (15,366 words so far)
Thoughts: This is the first words. I stared at the blank page for what seemed an eternity today. I figured if I can’t write the first words up there, I’d write the first words down here and see if that gets me typing. It did. So many death soliloquies. I knew I had to get parts of this exposition out, but I didn’t realize how painful it would be to write. Yes, I know, “just die already, Tenos!” I was thinking the same thing the entire time I was typing away. Luckily, this writing is about words, and the easiest way to write words is to stick them in a dying man’s mouth, or so I learned today.
Word count: 2,003
Words remaining: 32,631 (words so far: 17,369)
Thoughts: This is going to be a long night of writing. After yesterday’s deathfest, I’m fresh out of ideas and places to go. That’s not completely true. I do know where the characters will go, I just don’t want to take them there. Surprise, surprise. I need to think of something clever to get this moving again. I thought a game of Freecell would help. It didn’t. Don’t believe those little voices in your head. They’re usually trying to lead you astray. At least I can write filling. Today was about filling. I was hoping for the creamy filling. I settled for stale and stifling. Terrible, terrible, terrible! The misery, the pain and horror and all sorts of dark and nasty thoughts. I take deep breaths and try to push over one thousand. Just a hundreds words at a time, just another hundred and you’ll be done soon. Really. Can this story move any slower? Can nothing happen for this many words before my computer explodes? Stay tuned until tomorrow to find out. I need an outline of scenes. I need to know where this is going, what I’m going to spend my time on. If I have to spend my writing days like this much more, this will be an impossible month. Much consternation today. Much wasted consternation, I should say. Much resist sticking my finger down my throat. Must. Resist.
Word count: 3,059
Words remaining: 29,572 (words so far: 20,428)
Thoughts: Today was easier. The story is no better, but the words were not painful (at least on the way out—no idea how they’ll feel on the way in). I guess I should be thankful for little things.
Word count: 2,091
Words remaining: 27,481 (words so far: 22,519)
Thoughts: Today did not flow as well as yesterday, at least in the beginning. I kept starting and stopping, and the siren’s call of the internet was, well, siren-y. But things happened, and they happened of their own volition. It’s not necessarily what I had planned, but when the drumming starts, what am I supposed to do? March forward, of course. I did start figuring things out toward the end, though. It's weird how things start becoming clear after I've written them--like some of the foreshadowing that I had no idea what it meant until now. Strange things are afoot in Washen's Enclave. Strange things.
Word count: 2,261
Words remaining: 25,220 (words so far: 24,780)
Thoughts: Ah, I thought I had something today. I had big plans and I felt the words would roll out of me. Again, I admit I was wrong. Now, if I can only fight through this and get my words for the day, I’ll be happy. Another day where I felt my writing, my dialogue, my descriptions, my inane internal discussions were absolutely painful and worthless. Oh well. I’m keeping to the goal. On days like this, all I can think about is first-draft quality, first-draft quality. Almost halfway done!
Word count: 2,475
Words remaining: 22,745 (words so far: 27,255)
Thoughts: Not a strong day. But things kind of happened, I guess. And there were words of some sort, so I guess that’s good. I need to move forward and get away from this constant fake action. Maybe get back to more thinking and doing nothing. That seemed to make the words move faster or something.
Word count: 2,017
Words remaining: 20,718 (words so far: 29,272)
Thoughts: The blank page scares me today. I have to stand up to it. I’m bigger, stronger, and by golly it’s not going to scare me. Not again. Can’t I just kill all my characters in a large fire and be done with this badly thought-out, worse-ly written story? Isn’t that how all happy endings happen? Okay. I’m going to start writing now. Enough of this white page staring. That’s 69 words I wish I had written for my story. Help! It’s still not happening. Agh, this is going to be another one of those days with another one of those bad sections that don’t make any sense (unlike the rest of my nonsensical story). I was very tired when I finished writing this. I was out late, and I wasn’t able to finish it earlier as I had planned. Some of the plot points kept changing—I’m sorry for the inconsistency to my one reader. I do have an idea about where this is going, but I made some wrong choices along the way. Who am I kidding? I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore. I’m just trying to make my word count. I’ve given up on this whole notion of “coherency” and “storytelling.” Now I’m all about word count. If two words make sense together, consider that sentence a good one. Unlucky 13.
Word count: 2,267
Words remaining: 18,461 (words so far: 31,539)
Thoughts: I experimented with a flashback to see if it would get me out of my funk. I should stop wasting my time with politics. I’m just not good at it. And writing too. I’m definitely not good at that. At least the words came easier today. I spent most of the time telling instead of showing—but somehow, the telling ate up the words. I guess there are worse things. Now, if only I spent October telling so I could have spent November showing, the world would be a better place and dogs and cats, well, you know where I’m going with that. It’s getting worse. I’ve completely lost all coherencies in the story. I don’t even know where it’s heading or what it’s about. Ah, now I remember: words. Lots of them. This will be heading to the trash bin soon enough. I just need to cross the line to start crumpling.
Word count: 3,050
Words remaining: 15,411 (words so far: 34,589)
Thoughts: It started terrible, but toward the end, the caffeine fought my headache, and I wrote words.
Word count: 2,042
Words remaining: 13,369 (words so far: 36,631)
Thoughts: Okay, so I managed to say nothing in 2k words today. I don’t know why I couldn’t move the story forward (as if there is much of a story to move forward), but I couldn’t and didn’t. I guess there’s always tomorrow. At least I ate up more words. Mmm…tasty.
Word count: 2,398
Words remaining: 10,961 (words so far: 39,029)
Thoughts: I need to keep moving and stop trying to write filler, at least on my first run through the words. Filler is time consuming to create. I will write short and sweet sections, and then go back and fill in the gaps later to pad the words. Yes, I’m writing instructions for Marathon writing after my terrible efforts yesterday. I’m hoping typing worlds will get me moving again. It feels like I don’t know where this is going and because of that I can’t go anywhere. Not that there’s anywhere I can take this story that would be interesting or worthwhile. I’m thinking of it backwards: I have to write it first and then once I’ve written it I’ll find out where it goes. That’s much easier said than done.
I’m leaving for Taiwan tonight. I will continue writing every day but I might not be able to post every day. Until that number above passes 50,000, expect me to keep plodding away. (Another five days should do it. It won’t be pretty but it will be finished.) Things may get a bit challenging with the loss of a day on the flight. I’ll try to figure out whether I have to write on the plane, or if I can write tomorrow—I mean Sunday night. Time zones are very confusing.
Word count: 2,146
Words remaining: 8,825 (words so far: 41,175)
Thoughts: And the story continues to make less and less sense. As Ashken thought to himself, “This was making less and less sense.” I’m okay with that. I have about four more days of writing left, and I expect there to be a very abrupt ending once I reach the Goal. I’m done with this story. I fully accept that this was a failure in the storytelling sense. I had such big plans: robots and samurais and lost religions and finding meaning in choices and growing up. But alas, none of that came about. All I ended up with was meaningless whiney characters who didn’t develop and do much. And I won’t even go into the inner turmoil or the repeated thoughts. But that’s okay, as I said. There’s always next time and the time after that and the time after that. As long as I keep putting one word in front of the next, I’ll get the hang of this.
Word count: 2,371
Words remaining: 6,454 (words so far: 43,546)
Thoughts: Three more days. Woo hoo!
Word count: 2,729
Words remaining: 3,725 (words so far: 46,275)
Thoughts: I’m biding my time trying to finish. Isn’t filler great? I can say the same thing four different ways and call it progress. Less than two days to go. I already hear them carting the fireworks into position.
Word count: 2,016
Words remaining: 1,709 (words so far: 48,291)
Thoughts: I started late and I didn’t think I would finish today’s count. I thought today would be the first day that I would miss my self-imposed goal. At this point in my “story” (from the word count perspective, that is), I will not miss the Marathon’s deadline (there is more than a week left). But even knowing that, I managed to fight through the slow start and finished my count. If I’m serious about writing every day, then I can’t start making exceptions even for days when I’m tired (check), jetlagged (check), and headachy (double check). Somehow, over the last few days, my skills in word padding have increased tenfold. I wish I used some of these skills earlier in this failed project. Even my thoughts sound padded and forced. Yeah me!
Word count: 1,780
Words remaining: 0 (words so far: 50,071)
Thoughts: That’ll put a wrap on this bad boy story. Sorry for the exposition at the end, but I did have some ideas I wanted to get out, and there was no way I could incorporate all of those ideas into an action filled last scene. Well, except for the very end. That was my little gift to me.
Today was an exceptionally rough day. Julie and I spent twelve hours getting our wedding photographs taken at various locales around Taipei. I was exhausted, and I had to take a quick nap before writing. The quick nap took longer than I expected, and I woke up late into the night to finish the Marathon and this entry. My head is pounding as I type this from a day with too little sleep, too late food, too many little-warn eye contacts, and too much work. Julie is asleep as I pound out these last sentences. I’ll hopefully post these last two entries tomorrow and call it good. Or, at least, call it done.
It’s over. The Marathon, that is. I stuck a fork in it last night. I still don’t have a name for my “finished” story. From the looks of those quotation marks, it should be obvious my thoughts on the work. When it comes to saying nothing in many words, I have this exercise down to a science. I haven’t yet decided if this year’s writing is worse than The Pink Sweater or only almost as bad as The Pink Sweater. (I’m weaning myself away from using too many words to say something insignificant, if you hadn’t noticed.) Either way, I am once again not happy with my plot, story, or characters. And the writing, yeah, that wasn’t too good either. But other than those minor complaints, I’m generally satisfied with this year’s efforts. November is about making the Goal. The published best-selling-novelist part comes later (much, much later).
At its essence, the Marathon is about perseverance. Chuck in his wonderfully inspirational Nanowrimo podcast, The Sixty-Second Pep Talk, spent an episode talking about this. Everyone is capable of completing the Marathon. For most people, the difficulty arrives between capability and performance. A real marathon requires a certain level of fitness before a runner can even think about starting their training. The Marathon (with a capital M) requires only words. And, as I aptly demonstrated this year, the words don’t even have to make much sense when placed together. The real skill necessary for the Marathon is the ability to sit in front of a computer screen or blank paper each day and writing to a daily quota. It’s that simple. Okay, I’ll admit that it is easy for me to say that now that I’ve completed the Marathon. And perhaps it’s a bit simplistic for me to think that it doesn’t require any training to write 1,667 words in a day. Some people have not written a total of 1,667 words since completing school. What I meant to say is that at its essence the Marathon is about moving fingers for a month. The doing is hard work. But you have to ask yourself, if it wasn’t hard work, would it really be worth all that much?
With that said, this year was a struggle for me. There were many days where I started later than I planned, and then invariably blamed Julie for my procrastination. She would insist that we eat around dinnertime, and I would roll my eyes and point my finger at her and claim that she was single-handedly attempting to hinder the talents of a would-be-best-selling novelist with her insistence on sustenance. I would always feel terrible later, and crawl back to her to apologize profusely. As always, Julie understood and supported me by dealing with my insanities. She even tried to assist early in my story planning. (She’s very helpful with my planning. Remember, she rescued The Killton Academy for the Insane from terribleness.) But after the first week, I realized that her help was no longer necessary because there was nothing to plan as I did not possess even the semblance of a story.
After I arrived in Taiwan, my last four days of the Marathon were particularly painful in the literal sense: late-night headaches ascended from the lowest levels of hell to torment me as I stared at a blindingly bright screen in a darkened room attempting to convince myself that the pain would go away if I wrote just one more word. For the record, the pain did not go away with each word. If anything, it intensified into a blinding point of insanity until I finished the two-thousandth word and put down the computer for the healing confines of blissful sleep.
But the worst part of this year’s efforts were the uncountable days and nights where I sat in front of my computer knowing that my story had ground to a halt, my characters had abandoned me (and never bothered to write to at least let me how they were doing), and my plot, well, my plot, which had seemed so promising in my head weeks before, had turned out to have abandoned all semblance of coherency only to be replaced by a vacant pit so deep and discouraging that I was divinely gifted in the most visceral sense with the knowledge that this year’s story was an unmitigated failure. (Chuck wrote me mail as I penned this entry letting me know that I may be too close to the story; that it only took me 40,000 words to find a story peeking out of the ground. I wish to thank him for his sincere encouragement. I must be still too close to the story to consider anything more than an attempt by a good friend to keep me writing no matter how terrible the output.)
Through all these obstacles and excuses, I did manage to write my 2,000 (well, 1,700 on the last day to hit the Goal) words each day. And I even came away with a few nuggets of wisdom:
I’ve grown to accept first-draft quality in my Marathon writing. It took me a few days of writing, but I somehow managed to write without worrying about quality. Part of the cause was my decision to lock my writing. Although I did unlock the story for a few readers, my knowing that most people could not see the writing quality lowered my fears. (For as much as I claim not to care about the readers, I obviously do care—even if there are no actual readers besides the ones for whom I unlocked the writing, with the exception of my Mom, and as the above should make aptly clear, she did not miss much.) I’m hoping this first-draft acceptance spills over into my short-story writing. It’s a good skill to have because when I get around to it, I’m much better at the second and third draft than the first. The trick, of course, is getting around to it.
I discovered that saying the same things multiple times was good not only for my word count, but also for the quality of the story. I know that sounds ridiculous after everything I’ve said about how bad my story was this year. I have a tendency to keep my writing short and to the point—it’s the same tendency I have when speaking. When I talk, I am always watching the other person for the first signs of boredom. That doesn’t always allow me to relate my ideas fully. There are times where I stop talking, even though it would be better if I continued to explain the idea a few different ways. Similarly, when writing, I sometimes say too little to fully develop the idea. I leave too much unsaid about what I already know but the reader has no way of knowing. Repetitiveness, at least in a first draft, is better. There’s always the cutting floor after the second draft.
After writing 2,000 words for the past twenty-two days, I’ve decided not to take a break. If I want to pretend to be a serious writer, then I have to write every day. I won’t promise 2,000 words every day (today I came up a few hundred short of that goal), and I certainly won’t promise that the writing will be of any quality or related to a story. What I will promise is that I will sit down and pound out at least 1,000 words of musing or story or story planning, or some combination every day. We’ll see how this works out.