It's November, which means NaNo (National Novel Writing Month). For those that aren't aware of this, it's a self-motivated challenge to write 40k words entirely in the month of November. Tons of writers (and aspiring writers) from around the world join in and challenge themselves. And because it's a self-driven challenge, many struggle, at all steps along the way.
For some, even getting started is an issue. 40k words seems SO big (because it is!), and they may get stuck in the planning phase. For others, they will start strong, writing tons in the first week, but then they get burnt out and struggle to write at all. Some prefer to write in groups, or to find places outside their home to write, while others write every day, at the same time, in the same place.
Approaching any big project starts with the idea. You have to know what you want to accomplish. With NaNo, part of this is done, as the whole concept is the 40k word count. But you have to pick what you want to write about. In your path, you decide what you study and how deep those studies will go. Once you have picked the topic you want to explore, you have to determine if you want to do a broad study or a deep one. A broad study might teach you enough to recognize the appropriate terms and know enough to have a conversation about it, while a deep study might be what you need if you want to focus on that area or maybe someday teach about it. The thing about an idea is that it can change as you go along. You might start broad and realize you are keenly interested in the topic, and so you want to go deep in certain areas.
After you have your idea, you need to make a plan. This is where it really starts to get personal. Different people thrive with different types of plans. In writing, there are people who really need a detailed plot and outline. Coming up with this is vital to their writing. Other people struggle with this structured of an approach, and write best from the hip. But even if you don't want to plan out the whole story, having a plan for when and where and how you will write is necessary. The thing about plans is they can be quite fluid or very strict. You might tell yourself you will write during specific hours, while in a particular place, or you may just plan on writing something every day.
The same goes for any big project you are trying to tackle. Some people need to break it down into a series of smaller steps, and plan out each of those. Having a full outline, before they begin, helps them stay on track and keep everything structured in their mind. Other people find that they just need to think about the one thing they need to do right now. And if their first thought is too big, they pick which part of that one thing they can work on. Once that thing is done, they find the next thing to work on.
Once you have your plan, it all comes down to execution. And again, there are many ways that this works for different people. Some people work in spurts, so they might spend all day working on their project, but only work on it one day a week. For other people, that is too much all at once, and too much time off. They may need to work on their project a little bit every day. The key is paying attention to how your work flows when you work in different ways. You may find yourself frustrated after working for an hour and then needing to stop to do other things. This might indicate that you need to carve out bigger chunks of time to work. Or, you may find that if you don't have specific times to work, you get caught up in other stuff and forget, so making a clear schedule may be helpful to you.
When at this stage, it's also important to keep checking in with how you feel about the whole project. Sometimes we find ourselves stuck in something we thought we wanted to do, but the further along it gets, the more we realize that working on it is making us miserable. That means it's time to sit and reflect, to adjust if necessary. We may have thought we wanted to study an entire pantheon of deities, but after we got through the first handful, we realize that we aren't as invested in the rest. Maybe we only want to do deep research on a few deities in the pantheon, but we want a broad knowledge of others, and then there may be some we just keep in a list (in case we might want to read up on them later).
Adjusting your plan is not the same as giving up. Giving up is when you aren't willing to do the work to get what you want. Adjusting your plan is when you realize that you don't actually want the thing you are working towards. Especially when it comes to working your path, you don't want to be spending time and energy working towards things that aren't aligned with what you truly want to be doing. If you find something uninteresting, stop, adjust, and head off in a new direction. It's okay to pause in studying something, or set a topic aside for the time being. Sometimes you may find that you are drawn back to that subject at a later date (or after learning some other stuff that makes it more appealing), but sometimes you just realize that your interests lie elsewhere.
Big projects can be truly rewarding. When we have great interest in a subject and we want to connect better with it, spending time on building that understanding and connection can be fabulous. But if we try to approach big projects in the wrong way, they can crush us. It's well worth taking the time to approach these big projects in the right way....the way that is right for you. Pay attention to how you feel along the way, be brutally honest with yourself, adjust as necessary, and it will all pay off!
No comments:
Post a Comment