Date: 2023-11-06 18:08
Tags: writing

Week Two is almost upon us. shudders theatrically
When I started NaNoWriMo (a long time ago), everyone talked about the Week Two Blues. Oh it was going to be so hard to write then, because you saw how bad your book was. Or you were bored. Or you just didn’t like the idea as much as you thought.
I knew before Week Two even started, that I could expect suffering.
Did I suffer? No. I finished my book in ten days. It’s uneditable and un-salvageable, but it was the first time I felt like a novelist.
Two years later, I knew what the Week Two blues was. I hated my book. I hated my story, and I wanted to MURDER my main character.
I thought about abandoning my book. Instead, I gave myself a day to whine.
The next day, I opened my book file and read the main chapter, and you know what? The first chapter was kinda solid.
I skipped to the end of the book and wrote onward.
Ever since, the feeling did creep back at times, but I almost always battled it.

Here are some tricks on how I beat the Week Two Blues over the years:

  1. Write a journal entry about it. If you don’t want to be negative in your journal, get a piece of paper.
    Whine a lot on paper, scream about your character in your journal, get frustrated about that plot point. The journal is like an anti-venom.
    Once you’ve vented, write a scene that’s completely out of sequence, it could be a prequel, or just an insignificant plot point, or a sidetrack, where you just write your character in a scene that doesn’t fit in the novel.
  2. Take a bit of distance, just like I did in my example. If you are anxious about your writing like I am, you will be back tomorrow.
  3. Write a candybar scene. What scene were you looking forward to writing the moment you started plotting? Or what happens to your main character in a certain situation that makes you want to go all gleeful? Write it as a kind of palate cleanser. You don’t have to keep it like that, it’s just to help you to get back to your book.
  4. Write a letter to someone about how you love your idea and character, or write a letter from your main character’s perspective to a secondary character.
  5. Look at your plot. Where do you lose interest and why? Is there a point where you can skip ahead to, making notes of where to go along the way.
  6. If all else fails, write something else. Something short. Don’t start another novel, because before long your hard drive is going to be FULL of abandoned projects.
    So write that short story perhaps, or a blog post. Just get out of your character’s POV and into another for a little bit.

First and foremost though, don’t let people scare you into fearing losing touch with your book. Like in my first two years, I wrote my novel and that was that.

Write on,
Sylvia!