By now most of us know the wonders of a deadline. The rush to get things done by a cretin time, when we would have normally put it off for another day. That's the wonder of NaNoWriMo. It gives you that deadline. But there's another tool you can use to boost your word count within NaNo.
The desire to beat someone else.
Now I don't usually use this tactic when I'm face to face with someone at a write-in. Mostly because I suck at writing in public, but when I'm at home I do use my NaNoWriMo buddy list as a kind of score board.
Normally I start the day with one word count goal in mind, then when I finish it I look at my buddy list. Is there someone on there who's only a few hundred words above what I have? I can beat that! *writes out words and looks at the list again* Dang they updated and are ahead of me. *writes some more to get ahead of them* Ooo, I’m close to the next persons count. I could beat them too.
On and on until by the end of the day I've written twice as many words as I had been planning on writing. Of course I don't actually tell them that I'm "word warring" with them (I prefer to do a sneak attack while they're not looking). You can if you want to, but I like being sneaky ;-)
Perhaps it's just my competitive nature, but this always works wonders for me in November.
P.S. By the way, good luck to those setting off on this adventure that is NaNoWriMo. I'll add your name to my hit list- er, buddy list ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment