The Importance of Sitting Down

Hello, all. I hope you all had a fantastic election day and remembered to vote. I'm still smarting over the election results in my district, but I won't bore/annoy you with the details. On an upside, maybe my party will stop sending my letters reminding me to mail in my ballot. They send me more spam that ad sponsors.

For some election day humor, I bring you this excerpt from The West Wing. To lighten your day:



Now, on to my thesis for the day.

I recently had to read a very long biography of an author that was released 266 years ago. I'll spare you the name, because it was just that bad. For most of the biography, I wanted to slap the author. I'll skip the laundry list, but one of his more annoying qualities was that he never seemed to finish anything. Most of the biography was a litany of his plans to do work, most of which never even got through a first draft.

This makes me think of all the stuff people say about the importance of getting a draft written. I really agree with that, the idea that one of the biggest winnowers between People with Ideas and Authors is the Writing a Draft stage. I know, writing a full draft is hard. It takes time, effort, and dedication. And did I mention time? It's hard.

You know what comes in handy doing this? Putting your butt in a chair and writing something. You'll have heard of this. The Butt In Chair philosophy of writing. It's pretty common, and I'm something of a fan. Doing something every day, it helps get stuff done.

To me, it sort of seems that this is what NaNiWriMo is about. I know i've found myself doing it so far. I do reach a point where I might otherwise have stopped but, because of NaNo, I keep my butt in my chair and keep on writing. I'm already feeling more productive. (I just hope I can keep going.) NaNo's about getting 50k out there in 30 days. That's not going to work without behinds in chairs.

Good luck!

How's the writing going, NaNoers and non-NaNoers alike? How do you feel about the Butt in Chair philosophy?