I Wrote Millions Of Words ... Oh It Was Just Ten

As it is National Novel Writing Month words are everything. They are the centre of attention: how much can I write in a day? How long can sentences be? Let's ignore brief and concise, this is the month of rambling! Reach a daily average of words? Never mind that, we can write all 50,000 in a day. Easy! A picture says more than a thousand words, so if I drew 50 pictures would that count?

Probably not.

I write on a beautiful day. Then I stop and admire the paragraphs I have just brought into existence. I created something from almost nothing! So much of it as well, it must be thousands if not millions of words! Convinced that this breaks the world record of written words in an hour, I check the word count and ...

"oh, it's just 120." 

... it turns out to be far less than millions of words. Strange.

Then you try to argue with the result by counting the words by hand. This can lead to either adding 10 words, or losing 10 words. Either way, sadly it does not lead to finding 1,000,000 words.

Then it does not take long before you start to fiddle with the writing. When it comes to blogging and article writing - and in the olde days twitter - the more concise you write the better. People are not going to read Kafka like sentences when you could just write "he turned into a bug, my pal."

However, since NaNo, er, I mean National Novel Writing Month - seven additional words there, nice work! Anyway, since NaNo is all about word count why not help yourself to a few words?

"Suddenly" is an overrated word, instead "all of the sudden" works better. The same rule applies to "now" which becomes "at the moment." At a later stage you can edit this into nicer sentences, but NaNo does not factor in editing, so rambling is the goal!

Clever, right?

Maybe there are better ways to deal with this syndrome. Which I found scrolling through the #NaNoWriMo tag on twitter. I found the advice of Sarah McLean who does her NaNo in short sprints. She make a tally mark every 100 words, adding them up!

This is literally how I write. 100 word sprints. 100 words, 1000 times, makes a book. I keep track on paper. #nanowrimo pic.twitter.com/EiCaJtfcfo

— sarah maclean (@sarahmaclean) 2 de noviembre de 2017

This way it doesn't feel like you're writing bulks. Instead it feels doable and easy. Furthermore, you manage to keep a good track of where you are. This in turn means that you won't check your word count and wonder why 500 words seem to be missing!