| Oct. 24th, 2006 @ 05:06 am (no subject) |
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Current Mood:  contemplative
It's that time of year again, and everyone is talking about NaNoWriMo. I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to have a good go at it this year. There's a story I've been wanting to write - or perhaps a story I've been avoiding writing - and I feel I won't really get anywhere with any other writing until I face up to it. So blasting through it in a month seems like a good idea.
I'm slightly anxious, though, because this is a fab opportunity for me to just sit down and write this thing, but at the same time I seem to have difficulty doing anything at the moment. Well, I'm not having difficulty messing around with drafting stuff, but I am finding it hard to concentrate on what I need to write. And as for editing - gah, I have too many unfinished, unedited pieces on my hard drive to count. So we'll see.
The other issue is this whole "turn off your inner editor" thing. I understand that you do need to relax while working on a draft. But then sometimes you end up with something that's awful, and while that's easy enough to correct in a 3,000 word short story, it's a lot more difficult to weed out all the bad prose in a 150,000 word novel.
So I'm going to try and write consciously but non-judgementally: ie I'm not just going to toss off 2,000 words in an hour so I make my quota for the day, but at the same time I'm not going to agonise over the beauty (or not) of every word. Hopefully I'll find my tightrope and hang on to it.
Anyway, I'm unlikely to post actual excerpts from the (putative) NaNoWriMo story here, but I may well post my ramblings on the experience. |
