#FirstDraft60 Day 34: Friday Is S.W.A.T. Day #amwriting #nanowrimo
It’s Friday! It’s also the first Friday of the writing portion of our sixty-day challenge.
Even though we’ll be (hopefully) sharing our progress on a daily basis, on Fridays I want to know about your full writing week. What were your greatest successes during the week? What was your favorite line/bit that you wrote? What did you learn about yourself, your characters, and/or your story during the week’s work? What are you most proud of yourself for doing this week when it came to your writing? What are you proud of yourself for accomplishing?
In the business world, there’s a planning model called SWOT—which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Around here, we’re going to use SWAT, but we’re going to do it differently, so check in with the following recap for your week:
- Self-Evaluation (how do you think you did? what can/do you want to do differently next week? what did you learn about yourself as a person or as a writer? what didn’t you do or finish that you wanted to? etc.)
- Word count (total for the week, Tuesday through today)
- Awesome Accomplishments (breakthroughs, discoveries, highest daily word-count ever, etc.)
- Tidbits to share—something you wrote that’s just too good not to share or that struck you as funny or whatever.
If you don’t want to share this stuff publicly, that’s okay. You can add a section to your Story Bible or start a journal (or add this to your existing journal) to keep track of this. But don’t skip doing this—I think that in the future, when you look back either on what you accomplished during this challenge or (heaven forbid) why you gave up on it, the insights you’ll gather later with hindsight on your thoughts during the challenge will be invaluable.
Happy writing!
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KayeDacus.com 
Self-Evaluation: I think I am doing okay but I want to meet my daily word count goal every day next week! I learned that when I allow myself to just draft write that I am a bare-bones sort of writer, I’m getting the essentials of my story down (almost like stage directions and dialogue with minimal description/exposition) – not a bad thing really but a discovery for sure. I haven’t met my daily word count goal of 2,000 on any day yet except Tuesday (not counting today yet though) and I haven’t gotten all of my prep work into my Story Bible yet like I wanted to.
Word count total: This doesn’t include today yet as I haven’t finished but I have a 3 day word count of 4,249 and by the end of today it will be, come broken windows or clinging toddlers (my new take on ‘come hell or high water’ after yesterday), will be at LEAST 6,249. I will come back here and update later though. 🙂
Awesome Accomplishments: For the first time ever, I’ve written every day, regardless of amount that’s huge for me! I’ve also 99% accepted that it’s okay that nothing is perfect but is rather bad draft quality. My highest word count ever (possibly because I never kept track before) is 2,110 on Nov 1.
Tidbits to share: Not going to share it as it’s quite long but I wrote a scene that ran completely away from me as a secondary character I have a tentative story idea for took over the scene with a lot of insight into how her her arranged betrothed is quite the villain. It will be cut, of course, as she steals the scene way too much but it will be used in her story but instead of her telling her confidantes about this it will become a real-time incident between her and this villain (I’m thinking setup/hook at this point but we’ll see).
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Self-Evaluation: I let myself talk myself out of writing Wednesday night, ensuring I wouldn’t meet my 2,500-word goal for Day 2 . . . and then I wallowed for three days in “writer’s block”—something that I know only writing can overcome. I discovered that when i stopped keeping my “time sheet”—the spreadsheet on which I was keeping track of all of the time I spent on writing-related activities during the first half of the challenge that it’s so much easier for me to procrastinate and put off writing until I’m just too tired or don’t feel like it and then not do it. Whereas sticking to my pre-set schedule, for writing time and 1k1hr sprints (I have at least one on my calendar for every day of the week) on the first day and a half worked. So that’s my challenge for the upcoming week—to stick to that schedule as much as possible. And to try to ensure that word count goal is met before that final “if needed” time scheduled for sitting in the bed before going to sleep.
Word Count: On Tuesday and Wednesday, I wrote a total of 4,194 words.Had I met my goal of 2,500 words per day, I should have been at 10,000 by Friday/Day 34. But I’m not. And that’s okay. Because what’s important is that I make better choices about prioritizing my time (and not being lazy) for the rest of the month.
Awesome Accomplishments: This shouldn’t seem like that awesome of an accomplishment, but for anyone who’s been following along, you’ll understand when I say I discovered my heroine’s name! 😀 “Heroine” is actually a childhood mispronunciation of her full name, Hero Edwina. So she sort of was named Heroine all along—though she’ll mostly go by Hero.
Tidbits to Share: My favorite is still the “dialogue” that I shared on Tuesday:
“something hyppolita quote about a greek heroine here.”
“something else as a response from Mali that’s cheeky.”
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I only wrote 1130 words last week. And that was on 11/1. But I’m not giving up. 😁
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