Having only written something like 500 words, I felt like a failure. I started and stopped a few scenes, but couldn’t block out the conversations around me and the truly terrible music piped in overhead, even with my iPod on loud. I went, full of enthusiasm and hope, but I couldn’t seem to get in the groove. Time came for one of our local write-ins. It’s sad, but I can’t remember the last time I slowed down enough to do something like that. Today I decided to give my brain a break and do other things this morning like walking at the lake (yes, I’ve made my every other day exercise goal this week!) and just sitting and watching the leaves fall. I broke the #1 rule of NaNoWriMo: don’t think, just write. I started several scenes, only to leave them unfinished because I wasn’t sure how I’d use them in the end product.
But for some reason, I hit a slump last night – like the “ready to chuck it all in the trash bin” kind. Yesterday was still pretty productive, at nearly 2,500 words, some written in places as crazy as the hair salon, since it was a busy day. The book wanted out and it wanted out NOW! All I know is, by the end of day 1, it felt like I could write the whole novel in November. Okay, chalk that up to the enthusiasm of a new book and the excitement all over the interwebs about NaNo. We started out manic at over 5,000 words on the first day. I have told myself this over and over the last few days (well, actually the last few months, if you’ve been following my struggles with book 3 of Guinevere’s story). You have to create the world, it’s characters, their conflicts and dialogue before you can polish it to make it something readable. It’s also pretty much how I feel about writing a first draft. Biaggio was talking about her research process, but what she said can just as aptly be applied to the writing process. That quote is one of the gems from the workshop about writing women in history.
This morning I started listening the series of workshops from the Historical Novel Society’s 2013 conference that I purchased as audio files a few months back. Then I had to clean the mess up.” – Maryka Biaggio, author of Parlor Games This might just be my favorite picture ever.
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