Yes, yes: we’re all very impressed.

Well, no. I’m only kind of impressed.

Mostly, I’m suspicious. Your first day of NaNoWriMo… umm… wrimo-ing?

It’s very tidy, isn’t it? Nice and grammatical and spellchecked and all the verbs are tensing in the right directions and all of that stuff and that’s good, right?

No.

Ahem. That is to say, “no.”

You went back, didn’t you? You went back to something you’d already written and fixed it, didn’t you?

That’s bad.

I don’t care if the sentence you fixed was terrible. It’s supposed to be terrible. It’s a first draft, and you used up so much time fixing it.

How much time? Double the time? If only. If only.

Let me explain about a little thing called Opportunity Cost. I will use an example.

We have a writer in our example. Let’s call him… Doyce. Doyce is writing a story. It is the first draft, and it’s the first day, and Doyce has been doing revisions for so bloody long he’s sort of forgotten how to START a story and get all the stuff in his head onto the paper, so he flails around a bit. That’s normal, but Doyce doesn’t want normal. He doesn’t even want a first draft. Doyce wants the Great American Novel.

(Pro tip: if Doyce keeps fucking around, trying to get the Great American Novel, he will not get his first draft, either. Promise.)

Anyway, Doyce writes a bad sentence. Very bad. Ugly. Embarrassing. It says what he wants it to say, but it says it… the way a stupid… bad… writing person would say… something of that type of… nature. (See? Like that. Bad.)

So he re-writes the sentence.

How much time did he waste? How much more than “the time it takes to write a sentence” did he spend?

Two times? He should be so lucky.

1. The time it took to write the sentence to begin with.
2. The time it took to re-read it, doubt it, and decide to change it
3. The loss of the sentence he could have been writing when he was re-reading and making that decision.
4. The time it takes to write a better sentence.
5. The loss of the sentence he could have been writing while he was rewriting the first sentence.

So, he’s out 3 times the amount of time a sentence takes to write, and he’s two sentences ‘behind’ where he would have been if he hadn’t done the rewrite.

He’s a paragraph behind.

Imagine if he’d rewritten a paragraph.

Christ, imagine if he’d rewritten a page. You know what would happen?

What would happen is that the first 500 words that should have taken him about a half hour instead take him two and a half hours.

That’s horrible, isn’t it? That’s a big fucking waste of precious, precious time; time he could have spent recharging his creative batteries, instead of writing several more hours than expected and crawling into bed at 1 am.

That’s bad, people.

Don’t do that.

Learn from my this entirely hypothetical mistake.

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An unrelated “Inevitable Procrastination” tip: check out Maureen Johnson’s newest NaNoWriMo advice-post on embracing your inner suck-monster.