The Creativity Project: Zero Days
Incomplete days.
NaNoWriMo is supposed to be an unbroken chain of words. Or at least, that’s how I always saw it. It was a month of discipline to sit your butt in a chair and write everyday. To do less was a failure.
Obviously, my mindset has changed over the years. I know that I’m not going to write everyday. Life happens.
This year, I knew that there was the possibility of me not writing while I was crossing the country to go to my grandmother’s funeral. I built in a buffer of extra words so I wouldn’t feel like I had to take time away from my family to write.
What I didn’t expect was to not write at all during those three days. I was hoping to write on the plane out there. The problem became when we’d barely take off before landing again. There really wasn’t much time to pull my laptop up to write while we were in the air. And I was so emotionally drained when we got to the hotel that the words wouldn’t flow.
I knew our flights home wouldn’t fare any better. Not when we were up at three in the morning to head to the airport. I slept on the longest flight and again, for our final flight, we were barely in the air before we landed.
There were a few times where I could have forced myself to write when everyone was taking naps, but I was too tired to write effectively and would end up scrapping the words at the end of the month.
So I took my zero days. I didn’t let the pressure of the deadline force me to burn myself out. In the past, I would force myself to go past the point of burnout and not write again until March or April. That’s not sustainable if I ever want to reach my dream of publishing my book.
I feel like the past couple of years have taught me how to manage my energies and expectations better.
