Clearly, I need to bone up on magic and ritual surrounding the craft of writing on deadline. I made the mistake on Friday, after a good writing day, of ordering myself to push ahead to a total word count of 75000 by the end of the weekend.
I then proceeded not to get there until right now. Sheesh. Do I need to consult a shaman about this stuff? Or do I just need to stop setting myself intermediate word count goals when I have a bright-line final deadline anyway?
What jinxes your attempts to write toward a goal? What counter-hexes protect you? Share your sorcery, please!
I then proceeded not to get there until right now. Sheesh. Do I need to consult a shaman about this stuff? Or do I just need to stop setting myself intermediate word count goals when I have a bright-line final deadline anyway?
What jinxes your attempts to write toward a goal? What counter-hexes protect you? Share your sorcery, please!
When I wrote novels in the past, I would set a daily word-count goal -- something low, like 1200-1600 words. But then, I almost always wrote more than that. Once I got into the habit of writing every day, I found it easy to write a LOT every day. But then, it's superdooper easy to write a novel compared to a scholarly book where people will be all critical and shit. And look -- I haven't published my novels, but you'll publish this book. So maybe my advice sucks. Nonetheless, working on something every day (even for scholarship) is the only way I get anything done. I take zero vacation days when I'm working on a project, unless I'm forced to by actually going on vacation. Even then, I was thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you wouldn't have gotten that far today without the goal! I always have a fake deadline and real one that I mentally hide from myself. Usually I end up someplace in between the two. But without the fake deadline I'd be stressing out at the real one.
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