There are times when I am so bone chilling tired that it’s all I can do to stay awake until bed time. My schedule and job are physically demanding, but it’s no less tiring I suppose than someone who sits at a desk all day having to use their brain constantly.
Times like that are a pass on writing. All other times, get your word count in. Remember, there’s very little that can’t be fixed.
You might spend a tired night writing in your novel and completely goof up everything. Relax, it can be fixed later. You at least got the scene done. Names wrong, misspellings galore, dialog in fragments, but you got it done.
And sometimes you get these flashes of genius when you’re really tired. You’re writing, the story shifts on its own, and now its a case of, “Hey! Where did this come from?”
That was the lesson I learned in NaNoWriMo, when my novel deviated wildly from my outline. My window to even stay caught up in NaNo was rapidly disappearing thanks to a massive computer crash and lengthy restore process (bottom line – depend heavily on Evernote and Dropbox). My story deviated from the outline and if I tried to re-write it to conform, I was going to miss any chance of completing NaNo. To my surprise, I beat NaNo by a week AND ended up with a novel that was a departure for me!
I could have wrestled the book back on track, and possibly still won NaNo – but my decision to let the book drive itself was a great decision.
I continued to write even after I came down with Pneumonia (and had two more computer crashes while I was bedridden). Yes, the word count was down – but I managed to write even after I was deaf and feeling horrible. And my cat spent a lot of time in my lap.
Don’t sell yourself short. Even nights when you’re tired and heartbroken (especially then!) you can write, and write well.
Fight the good fight. You’re capable of more than you think you are!
