Yesterday was a beast. Over the course of a chat with theJamez, I realized that I was focusing on the wrong things to make NaNoWriMo completion a possibility. Coming from someone who successfully ‘won’ with over 50k in a month, I take his recommendations seriously. (Well that and he has an MFA in creative writing, so there is academic AND practical experience talking there.)
Given his pep talk and profound advice, I sat back after work yesterday evening and broke into a flurry of prose. I focused only on building out a character. More description than anything else, but it allowed me to pull off 1700 words in just under 2 hours. If I can keep up that pace and do some extra over the weekends, I can easily reach 50k by the end of the month.
The whole process last evening was quite interesting to me. I sat down without knowing –anything- surrounding what was to come, other than the fact that I was going to write about a character. And by that I don’t mean I was going to write about ‘this character’… I mean that all I knew I was going to write about was ‘A character’. From the first word, I began to figure out the basics: man/woman/adult/child, etc. and a scene began to build out of it, hints of a back story started mixing in, and before I knew it, I had six or so pages filled.
I’ll be doing the same tonight before Jean gets home and we sit down to laugh/scream/cry at the television coverage of the election results. Tonight, however, I’ll step away form yesterdays character and work on someone else. That should give me two points to focus future energy when one just isn’t working… I can step away and work on the other to keep things a bit mixed and fresh.
We shall see if this process works as well a second time around.
