It doesn’t matter what goals you set for yourself… getting that new job. Asking that hot girl out. Finishing that project by such and such day…. We are all going to have distractions, all have little things that set us back, or make the job harder.
Right now, stress seems to be the biggest one for me, and my goal of finishing NaNoWriMo, or more importantly to myself, finishing a full length novel.
And the stresses aren’t major ones. My tire was flat, I had to take my daughter to pick up her glasses, my normal back aches and pains. Nothing huge, but those little stresses add up.
Sometimes it’s best to just take a day off and relax. Breathe. Read a book. Listen to some music. Go out to dinner with your significant other. Sure, you’ll fall behind on the goal for a couple hours, but you can catch up.
Even if the only break you can get is taking twenty minutes to walk away from the entire situation and just do something that has nothing to do with your goal, you will return feeling fresh and invigorated.
Yesterday I was only able to put a hand full of words on the page. It was a struggle, and I decided the better idea would be to take a break. Finish the book I’d been reading. The word count wasn’t worth the stress. Not when I could take the few hours to pull myself together, and start fresh the next day.
That means I need to write 1800 words a day to complete NaNo on time, or just have some really good high wordcount days. Either way… I’ll get there.
Author Crissy Moss 
Reblogged this on Simon Cantan and commented:
A great post by Crissy about the stresses of balancing real life and writing.
Hang in there, Crissy. From what you’ve said before, it seems like your writing is better when you’re feeling it more. Maybe NaNoWriMo is too much pressure, which is stressing you out and making you feel the writing less?
I don’t know, I tend to save the stress for the editing phase. When I’m writing, it will be done when it’s done. I don’t set myself a deadline for that.
Usually NaNo is a huge incentive for me to keep writing, and write more. It’s the rest of life that I find stressful. Kids… love them so much, but man are they trouble 😉
You don’t have to tell me. My oldest are twin boys and they’re 15, so in the last year of youth school. Which means they have to decide their career path. Trying to get them to take some interest in their own future can be quite stressful 🙂
I just had to remind myself you’re not in the USA… our children don’t have to start picking out a path till after their 18. Many don’t decide what they want to do till 3rd year, just taking all the basics (english, math, science) and getting them out of the way before they finally figure it out. That’s what I was doing, then decided to stop going because I didn’t need a degree to write.
It’s new for me too, really. In Ireland, we’d decide at 18 too. In Norway, though, there’s a much lower emphasis on general education. They think that education should be preparing you for a job, not just learning for learning’s sake.
I say that often, and loudly too. But in the USA our education system is, like most of the rest of our country, based on money. The more classes required, the more you have to pay. So they require a lot to make you “a well rounded student”. But is’t pure BS. I learn more from watching documentaries and reading books then I ever did at college.
Well, there are huge disadvantages to the Norwegian method too. I mention something from history, or geography, and I get a lot of blank stares.
I think a more balanced approach would be to mould the course to the student’s interests. Like, if someone hates maths, but loves history, well give them more of that.
The problem is that even when you cram a bunch of knowledge into a kids head, they aren’t going to retain it. We are required to have so much history, math, science, and english… but the adults in the USA still can’t answer a lot of basic questions for any of those subjects.
The thing is, they could fix it all if they would just make the lessons more interesting, and less drudgery. Give them a good history book, and work math and science into every day problems that they can relate to. Or amazingly fun experiments that they could recreate in their back yard.
Learning CAN be fun. But they are so focused on test scores that all the fun is being sucked out of school. It’s a job, not a joy.
Agreed.