The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions is not a lack of talent. It's the lack of a deadline. Give someone an enormous task, a supportive community, and a friendly-yet-firm due date, and miracles will happen.
— Chris Baty
A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It's a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to creative pursuits.
― Chris Baty
In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from “best-seller” to “would not make someone vomit.” Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.
― Chris Baty
It’s the start of week three *whoops! that should be week four* of NaNo, can you believe it? Ten more days. Ten more stories. At this point it’s not the words I’m worried about – with my average story being 2,000 words long, I technically only need to write five more stories – but I really want to keep to my pledge of a story a day.
The novelty of writing a story a day is starting to wear off. At first it was kind of fun, you know? Now it’s more like a chore. It’s getting harder and harder to pick an idea, and I need to pick them earlier and earlier in the day so that I have time to think about them for a while before I start writing.
And it’s taking me longer and longer to get going once I start writing. I flounder around for the first five, six hundred words and then about halfway through the story I finally figure out where it’s going. Story eighteen I was almost 1000 words in before I figured out what I was doing.
So far, I’ve been sticking with the prompts I cherry picked from the Writer’s Digest prompts archive. I copy/pasted them into a single, ten page document and I’ve been picking them at random, highlighting the ones I’ve used. Lately, I’ve been going back and picking prompts I originally rejected.
I keep having to remind myself that nobody really needs to see any of these stories unless I decide to let them. I just need to write – to get the words down, any words. They don’t have to be good words or even make any sense, they just have to be words.
That doesn’t really work though, I don’t listen to myself. I’m making it harder than it needs to be because I like stories to have a point, to make sense. And with some of these prompts that’s a little hard to do. Also, some of the prompts really don’t lend themselves to a story that’s at least 1667 words long.
So far, I’ve written a couple of stories I really like, and some that I really don’t. The first story I wrote was supposed to be funny but took a serious turn. I can’t wait to edit it because I think I’ve got a winner there. And the aforementioned story eighteen – now that I figured out what it’s really about, I think it’s going to be a keeper too.
But there are more than a few stories that are real dogs, like story nineteen, which was a prompt about waking up in the body of a baby. Or the story written from the prompt where you go to bed wishing to wake up as someone else, and you do. Not too sure about yesterday’s story either, which I attempted to make funny but I’m pretty sure I fell way short. LOL
One thing most of these stories have in common though, is that they’re mostly written in the first person. I don’t know if it’s because the prompts are geared that way, or that’s just the way I’ve been interpreting them, but the weird part is, I don’t usually write in the first person. Could a first person novel be far behind?
God, I hope not! *shudder*
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
Wordage Report
NEW WORDS:
Flash anthology – 14,822
Blog Posts – 1226+776+634+1383=4,059
Total = 18,881 words
Still ahead of the game over all. But the bloom is off the rose now and I’m beginning to struggle.
EDITING:
Yeah, who am I kidding? When this is all done I hope I’ll find some editing mojo again, but right now it’s all about the NaNo words.
WHAT I’M READING:
Doing even less reading than last week. I read one chapter of The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman. It’s not that I’m not enjoying the book, I just don’t seem to find the time right now. Too busy writing, I guess.
What reading I’ve been doing is on the Kindle. I’m about halfway through a book about an Alpha werewolf who’s falling in love with a cop. The complication is the fact there’s a demon who’s going around raping and killing and causing mayhem, and they’re both after it.
GOALS
Once again I got two out of three. My NaNo is still progressing well, even if some of the stories suck. But I got all my blog posts up on time, so there’s that.
Did not get out to enjoy the sunshine, not that there was a lot of sunshine to enjoy. If it wasn’t raining it was windy, sometimes both. Cold and windy just doesn’t appeal. Maybe I’ll get out there for a walk come spring. LOL
THIS WEEK’S GOALS
1. Keep pushing forward with NaNo.
2. Keep up the good work on the blog posts.
3. Start working on my after NaNo plan. You know, the one for developing a better work ethic, like writing every day, doing some editing, maybe *gasp* try a little marketing.
Write on.
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