The Story My Father Told Me
Hazel Marion
I've definitely been putting off writing this blog post because I didn't really want to talk about what happened with my project for the past couple weeks. Basically, I made almost no progress in Weeks 9 and 10. I was feeling super unmotivated to do pretty much anything, from all my schoolwork to chores at my house. I just couldn't pick up my computer and write anything in my novel. In this bonus week over Thanksgiving Break, I've gotten a bit more writing done, but not much.
I'm not quite sure what has made me struggle with writing. It might be because the end is not in sight; this is going to be a very long novel, and I knew I wasn't going to finish it at the start. This is making me less excited to write, since I know I'm not going to finish anything. Another reason for my lack of motivation could be because of the editing that my dad has been doing after I write some in the novel. I've had to go back and change a lot of stuff, basically writing three different versions of one chapter. So really, I have been doing a bit more writing than my progress shows, because I've been changing and deleting large amounts of text. Writing raw material is much more exciting than editing, so getting through that process may have also slowed me down. It was necessary though, if my dad hadn't gone through and edited one part that I ended up changing, I would have had to change a lot more details, several more chapters into the book. The main reason I've not gotten much done in the past few weeks is probably because of my poor planning skills. I planned out my novel of course, but I've never had a plan of when to write, how much to write, where to write - any kind of organization that would make writing easier, more fun, and less stressful. The main reason I decided not to do this is because I am by nature a very unorganized person, and I work best that way. Organization is a waste of time in my opinion. Some people say it helps save time, but I don't like taking the time to plan things out only to not follow by my schedule, because that's what usually happens. I'll make a plan or schedule of my day and then not follow it at all. So that's kind of why I thought that planning out this project would have been useless, but it was probably worth a try. For the last two weeks of my project, however, I will be attempting to follow a strict plan and schedule. I want to write at least 1500 words a day. I really don't have much schoolwork; if I can get it done earlier in the day, I always have plenty of spare time in the evenings. (On a side note, no, I wasn't overloaded with schoolwork when I wasn't writing, I was just unmotivated and being lazy.) I want to start writing at about 2 pm (when I finish band class) and keep writing until I get at least 1500 words and feel like stopping. I typically don't write more than about 600-700 words at a time, but when I have written 1000+ words at a time, it really doesn't seem like I wrote as much as I did, which is a good thing. I'm hoping that the deadline of the project and a fresh start after Thanksgiving break will motivate me to write even more than I have ever before. Knowing me, I probably won't follow this schedule exactly, but I still want to make sure I get 1500 words a day. As of now, I have 15,684 words written in my novel, 41 pages in a Google Doc. 1500 words a day for the next 14 days would give me 21000 words, putting the novel at 36,684. This more than doubles the word count that I had before. It's crazy to think that if I wrote that much every day of my project, I would have had 126,000 words in my novel, which is a lot! Now, I really don't think I could have done this, simply because writing 1500 words a day for 12 weeks would drain all of my energy. But I think I can do 1500 for two weeks. It's a lofty goal, but it's what I need to do to be satisfied with the completion of my project. I'm really sad that I didn't get as much written in this project as I had originally hoped for. Keeping up the motivation to write without any incentives has been super challenging for me, and will continue to be as I try to finish this project and eventually, the novel. I'm going to try to think of more motivators to write in the next two weeks, and hopefully share them on this blog. Have a nice week!
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Hazel MarionI am a sophomore at Davie High School, participating in the Genius Hour Project for Mr. Barker's English class. Archives
November 2020
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