I’ve been behind in National Novel Writing Month.
I don’t have a list of my worst sentences from each day for you, as I did last week, because I haven’t been able to write every day this past week. I have, however, mostly managed to write enough words to fulfill my daily word count. I’ve done this by harnessing my undiagnosed ADD and writing in short sprints. I give myself 15 minutes or 30 minutes or even an hour to write as many words as possible, and usually a couple of those will generate the 1667 words I need. Or I’ll bring a notebook with me to class and write by hand, then type it up when I come home. I usually find that 100 handwritten words will generate another 400 while I’m typing. I’ve also been writing very late at night, which has helped my creativity.
None of that, however, kept me from falling behind. Yesterday I had to hustle to catch up.
Last night, I got home from a party, put on my pajamas and set out to type 2,000 words before bedtime. I almost did it, but not quite. Instead, I fell asleep at my computer when I was 28 words shy of 20,004, which was my goal. For the last 100 words before I fell asleep, I was apparently typing with my eyes closed.
Because I have no worsts for you, I’d like to share the paragraph I wrote with my eyes closed. It’s barely in English. Heck, it’s barely in broken English. One character, Ted, who I didn’t even remember this morning and who I apparently invented while I was sleep-typing, changes gender mid-paragraph. There is also a marked lack of punctuation. Enjoy. Or don’t.
Ted is covered in sweat. He’s been running from the over turned jeep. Athough it only takes a large saupods to cover th =e diance between jeep and barn, it has taken Ted much loner to do so. He’s out of break and covered in sweat. When He’s allowed in the babing of the truck, he stinks of fear.
“We have a problem,” he says
“What problem.” Dalena is sympathetic to his workers who have to work in the hot sun.He has no idea what she’s talking about.
Ted wipes his sleave aganst the dress ode. Rgiht. The problem is, he says, that there are more instances of the same
More of the same what, you may ask? And what is a “dress ode?” Will Ted ever get to the bottom of his gender issues? All valid questions. We’ll never know, because I fell asleep before ending the paragraph. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this. I may pretend that I just never wrote it and move on. But I won’t be deleting it. I need the 110 words.
I don’t think there’s a more pristine example of free-writing out there. Awesome sauce.
Thanks, Coveness. And thank for the follow. Love the name of your blog.
Brilliant! I’ve done that while writing papers for class before. I reread them in the morning and wonder what on earth I was dreaming about while wishing that I was taking a course in stream-of-conciousness poetry writing instead of whatever I was actually enrolled in.
It’s kind of a cool phenomenon, but a bummer if you’re trying to do something productive, like a paper or a novel. I’d like to just try sleep-typing for its own sake at some point.
Haha! This must be the weekend for sleep writing. I”m at a retreat and we were sprinting and when we said “stop” one girl kept on going…because she was asleep!
She wouldn’t share her words though, so thanks for sharing yours!
No problem. I have no shame!