It’s the second week of November which means some of you are bemoaning your NaNoWriMo word counts. Others are looking at the posted word counts of other writers and wringing your hands in dismay.

Stop worrying.

The process of writing isn’t a competition with anyone other than yourself. If you write 50,000 words in a month or a year doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is what you learn about how YOU write.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo (or an alternative January version of it– let’s face it November is a crap month for doing this) four times. I’ve never hit 50,000. The closest I got was 46,000. Writing at that kind of pace for a month drains me dry and makes everyone around me miserable.

I think I started my SRS WRITING with a goal of writing 10,000 words a week. Which, turned out to be crazy talk for me at the time. I lowered it and fought with it and argued with myself over how much I SHOULD be writing. I tried posting word counts publicly. I tried to shame myself into writing more. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Tracking what I wrote DID help. It let me see patterns. I wish now I’d kept even better records of where and when along with how much.

Writing always has an element of self-discovery. Learning your pace and your method is part of that self-discovery. Some people will learn that they can write 50,000 words in a month. I learned that I don’t work that way. Not yet. Maybe not ever. 46,000 words left me drained. It was like running the gas tank empty on the freeway to learn just how many gallons it really held. Sure, the information was valuable– but there are easier methods.

When I was a young actor I was commiserating to an older theater friend about a production I was in, and he told me, “Every director can teach you something even if that’s never to work with that director again.” I think that holds true for life experiences and people.

Hang in there. Push yourself how you need to push yourself to learn what you need to learn about yourself. No matter what happens this month you’ll know yourself and your writing that much better.

I’m starting to think writing is a bit like running a séance parlour for a living. Some days you’ve got a whole troop of spooks moving the furniture. Other days you’ve got the Duchess of Popularity and all her friends around the table without even an unexplained smell to entertain them. Your job is to make sure you are the only one who knows the difference. You wake up every day hoping the ghosts clock in and do all the hard work, but prepare to use every ounce of your intellect and abilities in case they don’t. You can’t sit back and trust the same old tricks every time because the majority of your clientele are repeats and will stop coming if you cease to astound and amaze them.