“There are two ways to get enough,” Chesterton once wrote. “One is to
continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” It is this adjustment
of expectations that I would like to consider in this post.
One of my hobbies is fencing (epee primarily, but I dabble in foil
occasionally, and sabre very rarely). Now, I don’t tend to fence in
competitions very much, but obviously even in club matches you are attempting
to win. You’re trying to improve your own abilities and develop as a fencer,
but basically you’re trying to stab the other person more times than they stab
you.
You start the fight determined to win. It often happens that you begin
to fence, and find that you’re falling rapidly behind. Your attacks are slow,
obvious and poorly executed. You find yourself obligingly moving your blade out
of their way and stumbling onto their point with all the combative grace of a
blindfolded, bow-legged ostrich. “Very well,” you say to yourself, “I’m
obviously not going to win, but I’ll at least get twelve points before he gets
his fifteen.”
Time passes and more hits are landed (by him). “Okay then,” you
concede, “but I’ll at least get to ten.”
“Fine, five.”
“Three surely?”
“He may win, but I’m at least going to score once! I shall not allow this to be a complete whitewash!”
“Oh. Bother.”
All of this is really just an elaborate preamble to my main topic. In
my last
post, I declared my intention to participate in the National Novel Writing
Month. I am pleased that I can already report my success. I have indeed
participated.
Unfortunately, what I am not going to do, alas, is win.
The primary reason for this is that our landlord spontaneously decided
(having, no doubt, read my blog) that they wanted to terminate our tenancy. Cue
frantic house searching, followed, in the last two or three weeks, with
packing. This has seriously cut into my writing time, and even when I have had
time, I’ve been rather too tired. Added to this, we spent a few days at my
parents’, and although I took a laptop and a host of good intentions with me, I
actually got very little done.
I am now very far behind, with little chance of catching up before the
deadline of the 30th of November. Very well then, instead of
accumulating more and more, I shall desire less. By that, I don’t mean that I
shall consider an achievable twenty five thousand words a win. Rather, I am
determined to do something I’ve never achieved before, and actually update my
word count every single day. I’ve completed Nano numerous times, but I’ve never
once managed to get through the entire month consistently adding words each
day.
It will probably never actually be the standard 1667 words that would
be required to win under normal circumstances. In fact, one day it was only
twenty six words, but I am determined to achieve this small goal. I shall
adjust my expectations.
And at the end of the month, although I won’t have hit the target, I
shall have twenty or thirty thousand words that I didn’t have at the start, and
that’s considerably better than nothing.
