Day 10
30 mins planning + 1 hr planned writing + 10 mins gratitude journal
This is our last day of Part I: Conquering Self-Doubt and Procrastination.
Jacqui has noticed that the “behind” mentality can stop us progressing overall. We feel like we’ve missed a step, which needs to be ‘made up’ before we can go on, which feels like extra work. Better to accept a missed day, and either skip that step, or shift everything forward.
The consequence will either be a novel draft with some thousand words short of the target, or a novel draft which meets the target a few days later. (Hey, some days we may even find extra energy to double our word count and return to the previous timetable.)
The point is that either of these compromise positions put us in a far better position than the uncompromising position of having to stick exactly to the plan. That way, avoidance lies.
Jacqui doesn’t link this ‘do or die’ approach with perfectionist thinking, but that is what I recognise it as. I am a perfectionist and like many qualities, it is useful in controllable amounts and not useful in uncontrollable amounts.
I am still trying to work the dial.
Sometimes I can review my perfectionism logically, but sometimes I need a guide to point out the obvious. So it’s helpful to have Jacqui pose the question: if you can’t have a 30k draft, what’s better: a 24k draft, or no draft because you got overwhelmed by your own expectations?
Exercise
- Planning: use questions from Day 5 and Day 6 to plan the direction of your scene (I used the 30 mins I already do)
- 1,500 words: writing continuously for an hour, without stopping or revising, seeing if you can
- Think of a reward for your efforts so far
- Day 6 of gratitude journal
My response
- 1,000 words + reward: combining the reward with the advice to not worry about “being behind”, I spent my planning and 1,500 words today writing a scene between two characters who currently do not have a place in my draft story, but have been bouncing around my head all day. I don’t want to lose the inspiration, even if they never enter the novel. So while there may be 1,500 words missing from my completed draft, I will have bottled the lightening on another story, which could turn into something useful one day.
all course content copyright Jacqui Lofthouse thewritingcoach.co.uk