Just a little behind

If you've been curious how the Nanowrimo is going, well, the post title says it all.

On second thought, the title doesn't quite cover all of it. I am a bit behind where I should be at this point in the month in order to reach the goal of 50,000 words by November 30th. But I'm not terribly far behind, and today is the day I'm going to try to catch up to where I should be.

I need to average just under 2000 words a day to reach my goal. Right now I'm about a day behind. Part of it is because I've never undertaken something like this before. It's been a strange experience, working on a long piece of fiction with this kind of deadline/challenge hanging over my head.

It's also hard. There are some days that as I'm writing, I'm checking the word count every 200 words or so because it seems so hard to get them on the page. It's not that I don't have ideas for the story. I know where I want it to go, and I've got it mapped out for the next 5,000 words or so as well as some episodes that I want to include later on. But sometimes translating those ideas into those black marks on a white page is much harder than I ever thought it would be.

It makes me wonder whether other writers struggle in the same way, or whether it comes more easily to them? I don't know the answer, but I'm clinging to the hope that it will be like other things that I've tried. At first, they're really hard, but then get easier as I get more experienced at doing them. My academic writing has been this way. As an undergrad, I used to struggle a lot to get papers written. Not because of a lack of ideas, but just the process of getting it onto the paper in a format that I was satisfied with. But as I've progressed through my degrees, it's gotten easier. Not that it's easy. Just easier. I still feel like I'm sweating bullets at various points in an article. It's just that there are also places where I can sail along relatively unhampered by difficulties our doubts about what I'm writing.

Part of the reason why I took up the Nanowrimo challenge is because I wanted to see if that same thing could happen to a piece of fiction. I guess we'll see when November 30th rolls around.