When Do You Stop and When Do You Forge Ahead?

Let me save you some time here and tell you at the beginning that I don’t know the answer to this question. Just in case you got all excited and called your writers group to come read this blog.

But I bet you know what I’m talking about. When do you realize that this was just a really bad idea? Or that you’re the wrong person to execute an otherwise good idea? (Or the right person to execute it in the homicidal sense of the word!) When do you say to yourself, “Self, this ain’t an easy task you’ve got here, but I believe in you, you can do it”? When is the cost of continuing greater than the cost of quitting? How will you know until it’s over and the dust settles if the cost was worth it? (You know what I mean – missing a birthday party, skipping the holiday decorating with the kids, writing in another room while people relax and tell stories after Thanksgiving dinner.)

I think about “costs” every time I look at my credit card bill – maybe I should get a job with a weekly paycheck for six months or a year. (I have finally stopped calling them “real” jobs. I hope you have, too. Writing is a real job. That’s why so many people around the world in a variety of ways get paid for it.)

Instead of dwelling on my credit card bill (I’ll allow myself to wallow in those blue pages in December when NaNo is over), I simply gave the problem to my heroine. Yesterday. When I needed to stop thinking about my real problems, and concentrate on her imaginary ones.

So now she’s sitting there at the end of Act 2 trying to decide if she should throw in the towel. Maybe this is a fight she can’t win. If she loses, she’ll be devastated. If she simply chooses to sit this fight out, she has less to lose. But she also won’t win what she so desperately wants.

It’s a conundrum. (I love the sound of that word – conundrum. Conundrum. Already it makes you wonder which path to take.)

It’s kind of a fight or flee type of question. I don’t know the answer for myself personally. Will I try harder, or at least keep trying, to complete this 50,000 word challenge? Or will I say it’s not worth the fight? Decide that other things are more important, like getting my grad school application completed and turned in? It occurred to me that “losing” the NaNo challenge has no repercussions, and I’ve already won something I desperately wanted – writing routines. Until this month, I’d been without a real writing routine for a full year! But now I have a routine I follow Monday through Friday, a routine that has netted me half of a first draft in only three weeks! That is a “win” no matter how you look at it.

I don’t know if I’m willing to cancel all my plans for the rest of the month, to stop showering and to write instead of sleeping, just for the sake of a pretend deadline. I think I’ll be a bigger winner if I don’t exhaust myself now and therefore don’t quit doing what is working for me, making sure and steady progress. If I write a first draft in five or six weeks instead of four, it’ll still be a praiseworthy accomplishment. It will prove I am dependable in my output. It will prove that writing routines produce results that create writing careers.

I don’t know for sure what I’ll do. I’m so competitive that I hate the idea of not getting the little “winner” badge. LOL!

But I do know that, with the help of friends who love her, my heroine is going to get up and choose to fight. And who knows, maybe as I get caught up in her struggles over the next week, I’ll find I can 20,000 words in five days. And shower, too.