Doubling Up

There are lots of ways to do it. 

You can type on an electronic keyboard, or a manual machine. You can scratch on paper with a mechanical pencil, or generate flowing loops of cursive letters in a notebook with an elegant fountain pen. You can uncap your Bic or sharpen your Staedler or your No. 2 Ticonderoga.

Whatever tool you use, the words must flow from you, or else remain forever unknown. The novel is there, inside you, and its only way into the world is through your writing.

We tell ourselves there are more important things to do right now than write. That we still have three whole weeks before the end of November, but only one Saturday in a weekend. We pet the cat or walk the dog, we study or watch TV or check the Twitter feed or open a book someone else wrote, while the novel remains trapped.

The challenge today is to set aside whatever other thing it is that stands in the way of writing, open the floodgates, and let the words flow from you into the world. Double-up! Don't let yourself stop until you done twice as much as any previous day—or more. You can do it.

My "normal" pace so far has been to write an average of 2500 words a day—not counting the disaster of yesterday's battle with Internet connectivity, which isn't "normal" by any definition of the word. My personal goal today is thus 5000 words. My plan is to double up my writing sessions, ignoring all other uses of my time in favor of letting the words flow.

Word sprints may work for you—the NaNo team has some national sprints set up, and your regional group may have more. There are local write-ins galore. You can challenge your writing buddies to meet goals, or promise publicly to meet a certain mark today, and then post your progress—or triumph—online. You can race someone across the globe, or someone right there in the room, and celebrate your win with a donation to NaNoWriMo in your own name, or as a HaloSpree.

There are lots of ways to do it. Just do it!

Word Count: 2504 Day 7 and 15302 Total