Yup. As everyone knows, this month is November. As most people *should* know [for many of us bloggers have been mentioning/spazzing/"OH GOD NO" about it for a month, a least], this month is also National Novel Writing Month -- NaNoWiMo, or just NaNo for short. Meaning that we ought to be well on our way to writing fifty-thousand words. In one month.
Now, I must confess. I'm an odd sort of writer. When I want to write, I write. However, I don't write in chronological order; scenes appear in my head, and, if I get lucky, I scribble them down, expand on it, make it a full blown chapter [my chapters are an average of two-thousand, three hundred words long]. Then the muse withdraws, ponders, and comes back.
Thus far, I've gotten a grand total of eight thousand, three-hundred and... ninety-nine words, with two hundred forty-six of them a summary rather than a chapter. And have come to a stop. I've realized that I don't know where I'm going with this, which is why my brain has stopped coming up with the mini-scenes. There's a few different ways I could save all those thousands I've already written, or I could start over...
But starting over would mean that I'm terribly behind, which would give me even less inspiration to continue. At the same time, however, it would give me a brand new topic [of only Elune knows what] to write upon, and maybe the muse can seize up upon it more. As a third option, I could hack two centuries away from the story, and relocate it to somewhere more around the 1800's, an era that I am familiar with more so than our own. But that would mean editing, something Skyla said we should lock away... but if it gave me plot, if it gave me muse... why not?
It would mean nearly starting over, but I can keep much of my material... and would have a rake, and, if I truly wanted to make it cross the fantasy world, I could. Vampires are much easier to integrate into that era, for some reason...
Oh, and there's always the option of keep plowing on and seeing if the muse can do it...
I'm flailing, that's for sure. Oh, and it's four in the morning and I just got up from my four hour nap...
1 comment:
Well, sitting down and trying to come up with a way to link each of that passages together would work. I'm much of the same way myself, though I've found my attempts at NaNoWriMo a little easier because the entire story is based on a roleplaying session and so I merely need to expand on the story and already have the plot outlined.
I have a friend who knew a woman who wrote stories in the evenings after working. She'd go to her store the next day and tape the pages she'd wrote on the inside of the glass display window so that the people passing by could read. This way, she could never go backwards and could only go forward in her writing. I always thought that it was an interesting idea, though I could never do that myself!
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