1 method for reaching your word count (and smashing writer’s block!)
With #NaNoWriMo starting literally hours from now, those of us who suffer from writers block are looking at the daily word requirements and twitching.
Now, I know a lot of you are thinking ‘but DTWB! how am i meant to manage 1667 words a day when i can’t even write 2 words a week!?’
Well, Anon-kun, you’ve come to the right place :)
First I’d like to refer you to a post on reddit’s r/writing forums by user moebius23 called ‘ I started writing 1.000 words a day exactly one year ago ‘. In it, moebius describes how they have written 1000 words per day and, at the time of their post (1 Dec 2014), were at 427,002 words!
They talk about my favourite writer’s block murdering go-to thought:
THE FIRST DRAFT IS ALWAYS SHIT
As well as this thought, which is so beautiful at smashing your inner editor right in the chops so they bloody well pipe down, moebius goes on to say the one thing that is guaranteed to murder your writer’s block:
I never experienced a writers block, I think. Sometimes I don't know what to write, and get frustrated so much I want to scream (is that it?). But that's just because I don't know what will happen next. Try writing 1,000 words on the thoughts of a character. It won't advance the story. Who cares? You can delete this part later. Maybe the next day you'll figure out what to do.
(bold added by me)
When you get stuck, pick anything - anything - and write down what you think about it. You could do as moebius suggests and write about what your character is thinking about, or you could look up foxes on wikipedia and then write down the parts you find interesting, or you could (as Tim Schafer says in his brilliant freewriting post on the Broken Age backer forums) just write the word ‘rudabega’ over and over until your brain gets so bored of that that it starts making you write down that you’re bored of writing that. This technique, which is essentially freewriting, is very useful for facing the terror of the blank page - for ‘breaking the ice’ as Schafer puts it. Writers block is essentially the fear of your writing being shit and ruining that nice clean blank page. But if you know that you’re just writing anything - that it’s all shit - then your fear will break, and by the second page you’ll start to think about what you want for your story.
Also, as a side note, I tend to find that if I don’t write my way out of my bad thoughts, then the good ideas don’t tend to have any space to grow - if i’m telling myself that i’m awful all the time then i can’t hear the idea for that bit of the story, or which character should wield that particular weapon and so on.
So there you have it. Make yourself write, even though you think it’s going to be terrible. Write anything, and you will beat your writer’s block and NaNo this year :)
This is what I’ll be doing! :D
I wish you all luck, and remember - if you have any questions or if you’re stuck, pop an ask in my box, Anon-kun ;)
That’s what I’m here for <3
~DTWB
