Zen And The Art of NaNo

I’m sort of kidding about this. Because honestly, there isn’t much art to it. At least not for me. And I have to stop myself from going back and editing and fixing. It’s sort of painful, really – because I know what I’m producing isn’t the best I can do. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The whole idea of NaNo is to just write, without giving that inner editor a chance to pontificate over whether or not the sentence structure really makes sense, or if people really *can* muse out loud.

But it’s hard – maybe doubly so for me because I didn’t actually plot anything out, other than what I sort of had down for the books I was already working on. (Which wasn’t much, panster that I am). So what this means is that I’m writing and having to make it up as I go. Well, truthfully, not so much for ShadowWeaver. I’ve got an inkling of where Abby’s going and she’s fairly easy to just set free. I don’t really do much more than watch over her shoulder and write down what she does. Not to say I won’t need to edit, because the current conversation between her and Charlie right now is painful. (on a number of levels) And I can do better than that.

MoonSong is changing as I write it, from paragraph to paragraph. I’ve given up trying to back up and fix it. At this point,  I’m just sticking notes in the margin to remind me to rewrite the entire last two pages because now it’s become apparent that the hero *didn’t* actually get punched in the face – he’s had his fingers crushed. And then I just keep going, writing as though his fingers *did* get crushed, with all the immediate fallout thereafter.

It’s confusing…and sort of exhilarating, all at the same time. And I’ve discovered that the hero *really* wants to be the protagonist here. I cranked out 1500 words as though it was nothing…but the moment I tried to switch to a different PoV? It was like I had to drag every word out of them.  And then I ended up in his PoV anyway. Moral of the story? Stop fighting it.  LOL. He wins. It’s *his* story now…at least until NaNo is over – at which point I’ll take stock of what I have and rework it a bit into more of a solid foundation (for both pieces). By then I ought to have between 30k – 40k on each, so it should be good enough for a start.

Words of wisdom? As per fairyhedgehog, turn off the internet (unless you’re doing a writing challenge). And Twitter. And Facebook. And email.

And don’t load up Dragon Age: Origins either.

Even though you’ve been waiting almost 2 years for it to come out.

And it just came out yesterday.

And it utterly, utterly rocks.

*cough*

At least, not until the words are down and backed up. 🙂

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