Reminding myself of the objective

Writing is hard for me. Really hard. Especially the part where I have to actually sit down and write the things that start crowding around in my mind. I've noticed, though, that nothing spurs me to write as much as reading articles, books, or whatever else, about writing. Inevitably something said in an article will make me think of a way to write one of those lurking ideas, or at least make me think that it would be possible if I only made myself try.

But so much of the stuff I read about writing resonates more strongly for me with drawing. I'll always fall back on drawing, I think, because I know I can do it with much more ease than any other art.

The problem is that I want to get to that point with writing as well. Drawings don't tell the same kinds of stories that writings can. I wish they did, and sometimes I wish I didn't have a mob of characters and settings and plots bugging me to be written while at the same time reminding me that writing isn't my strongest talent.

I also have to remind myself that I've been drawing for as long as I can remember and bringing my writing skills up to where I'd like them to be is going to take a lot of practice and effort.

As part of that practicing I'm currently writing for National Novel Writing Month for my third year in a row. I've never made it to the 50,000 word goal, but that doesn't bother me too much because the first year my goal was to see how far I could get and the second year was to exceed that. This year somehow I got it into my mind that I could do the whole 50k and managing to do much less would be more disappointing than it should be.

Last year I hand-wrote much of my Nano novel. While it's been fun to see how much faster I can type now compared to a couple years ago, I realized today that it was the handwritten pages that I remember best (typing them and rereading later I suppose were factors) and which were just overall better. They were much more purposeful.

Typing is fun, and it really helps with getting through my daily goals without being too much of a burden on my time, but I'm questioning if I should step away from the computer again and set a different goal for myself than a word count and a meandering story.

And I've just hit the week two block where school gets a little overwhelming and motivation to write gets really low. Yet, in both stubbornness and competitiveness, I really want to reach that 50k this time (while demonstrating that a person's social life doesn't necessarily have to suffer to do it). I'm only one day behind, assuming I write today's words. But is that going to get me closer to what I'm striving for?

I haven't exactly outlined this story yet, and it's been giving me lots of fun surprises, but I don't think writing an outline is going to help much in this case. So I'm going to try drawing one instead.