Knowing when to stop: something I've come to learn the hard way.

The key to knowing when to give up is one of the sure fire ways not to burn out.

Sounds obvious, right? Yeah, I thought so too. That was until I pumped out a massive 25k word count over an eleven and a half hour period (for number nerds that’s somewhere in the region of two thousand words and hour). Elated with my achievement, I promised myself I would go back the following morning and pump out the last fifteen thousand words or so. Needless-to-say, it didn’t work out that way.

The thing was, the following morning I simply couldn’t bring myself to type a single word. I had the final part of the story rattling around my head, but despite my best efforts I simply couldn’t do it. I’d burnt myself out, I think. And two days later, I’m just about ready to finish up – though it will be at a much slower pace.

You see, I’d had the germ of an idea running around my head for a long time, and every time I sat down to start it, well, it just never seemed right. I’m not talking about the words here, but the whole story I wanted to tell. I knew the characters. I knew the setting. I knew, vaguely, where I wanted it to end. I had mapped out the whole thing from start to finish on the inside of my head. But every time I came to write it ... something just wasn’t right.

So it stalled. I wrote anything, and everything, else in between. Because I knew, sooner or later, I’d either realize what the problem was, or, eventually, it would present itself somehow.

And it did. The problem, I later discovered, was with the voice of the story itself. Every time I sat down to my desk I realized I was overcomplicating it with needless detail the narrative simply didn’t want me to include. This notion struck me early in the morning, and with nothing else to do that day, and with plenty of coffee to keep me going, I set about knocking out the words. Before I knew it, I’d gotten everything down I wanted to get – aside from the ending.

At this point I’m going to add that the quality of the words can always (and usually are) refined within the editing process. I’m fairly confident that there might be more to add along the way, little things mostly. For the time being those things don't matter. What does matter (for me at any rate) is that the words finally came out. 

Looking back on it, perhaps I should have slowed my pace a little – maybe I should even have called it a day before I (temporarily) burnt myself out. Who knows?

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that we should know our limits. 

I kept punching out the words even though I was acutely aware I should probably stop; and because I didn't (the machine was still giving me everything it had) the days afterwards were just as bleak as they had been in the day's and month's before it - where I'd toiled over a story that just couldn't be told at the time. 

Remember, everything has its place. Even word counts.