SloMo WriNo: Rest, Reassess, Refine
November is over! We are one month into the challenge! And how are you feeling?
I haven’t done Nano for many years now, but I still feel a sense of relief when the month of November is over. There’s an ambient sense of anxiety in the online writer community that seems to infect me despite my best efforts.
But come the 1st of December? Freedom!
I intended to write a post discussing that, but instead I stopped dead. I felt unable to write a single word.
“Is this what people talk about when they say they can’t write?” I asked a friend. Who laughed at me. Not because she’s mean, but because I’m always the one with a hundred methods for getting around writer's block. I am the master of ‘just write the next sentence and the rest will come’ positivity.
I can always figure out a way to write if I really want to write.
But this time I couldn’t.
All of my executives had decided to stop functioning. I wanted to lie on the couch and enter a vegetative state. The human equivalent of an error code.
I had to stop for a moment. More than a moment.
A week, it turns out. A week of not writing at all.
I actually fought it for a few days, managing to edit and note down ideas. In retrospect, that was a bad choice, it just prolonged things. (It’s always easy to see these things in retrospect.)
You know those posts you see circulating that say stuff like ‘writing isn’t just writing, it’s taking a walk and looking at sunsets and etc, etc, etc.’ I firmly disagree. Writing isn’t an ethereal experience, it’s putting words on a page.
But making words doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It doesn’t come out of nowhere. It can be draining. Emotionally and physically. So while I don't consider breaks actually writing, I know they're necessary.
A person in the wip discord summed it up well by saying this: I've been pushing forwards so much I didn't let myself look back .
The combination of some things going on in my non-writing life, and the extra pressure I’ve been putting on myself to host this challenge, meant I hit a point where rest was required.
If, like me, you’ve found that after hitting a certain date or word count, you’ve slowed down or stopped writing, don’t punish or castigate yourself. (I say, like a hypocrite who spent at least two days in recrimination land.) Breaks are good and healthy. Don’t be ashamed of needing them.
But take a moment to think about why. What’s working and what isn’t. No matter what, it’s a good time to think about what you’ve accomplished, and where you’re going next.
For me I needed to assess how much time and energy writing these SloMo posts require of me, and how much I need to adjust the rest of my writing goals to accommodate that. I’ve realized that writing nonfiction takes a lot more energy from me than writing fiction.
You too may discover that certain projects require more effort and energy than others.
Or you might find that you’re tired because you’ve written more in November than you have in a while, or that the mental and emotional effort of implementing a new habit has been tiring.
It’s also time to reassess the mechanics of what you’ve been doing.
How is your current writing schedule working? Does having a minimum and maximum goal help or hinder? Is the time of day you’ve been aiming for working out? How is it affecting the rest of your life? (it’s no good to be getting words on the page at the expense of your work, relationships, and/or mental health.) Be ready to discard any and all advice from me or anyone else that isn’t working for you.
More than anything, don’t let the fact that you needed to rest and/or reassess stop you from pursuing your writing. Make the needed adjustments in your goals and schedule. And then get back to writing. (Like I’m going to. Right now actually.)
