- Writing Time: 01:20
- Session Word Count: 1835
- Total Word Count: 43970 (41667 par)
The great gift of NaNoWriMo is a simple goal with no value judgements.
I once read that in order to be a writer, you need to develop a sort of schizophrenic mindset, where you simultaneously have complete faith in your work, but also see every single flaw. This is so you don’t give up on writing altogether, but you’re still driven to edit and polish until it’s as good as possible. It can be incredibly hard to keep that balance. If you’re anything like me, on a given day you probably fall more into one camp than the other. I don’t find a happy medium so much as vacillate wildly between extremes.
NaNoWriMo says, “turn that editor off.” Neil Gaiman’s glib description of writing is, in this case, perfectly correct: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done.” At the end of the month, you may not have a good story or a complete story, but you’ve at least got a brand new collection of 50,000 words in an order that nobody has ever arranged them before. It’s an ephemeral and somewhat arbitrary achievement, but hey, so is finishing a marathon or eating seventy hot dogs in a sitting, and we celebrate those.
Today’s session followed yesterday’s thoughts about causing more trouble for my characters. Sure, they’re already swimming between islands in a thick fog that prevents them from seeing the shore, but in the spirit of really ruining their day, I had them nearly run over by a ferry boat. They lost a pack and the compass that was helping them stay on course, and got split up. Now we’re having a good time.
I didn’t plan for these problems, so I’m off the edge of the map at the moment. I’ll have to figure out how to resolve them before I can continue with the plot as planned. Should be fun.
Words Deferred 