Ugh.

[goteam]

I can't stand to read what I wrote for last year's National Novel-Writing Month, but it's been so long that I don't remember it well enough to outline what still needs to be written! Bleaaaugh!

Part of me (ok, a large part) wants to just give up and throw it all out, but I know that's a bad idea because I never finish anything. Somehow I have to

Comments

[linley]

I consider the writing done for NaNoWriMo to essentially be one big freewrite--you turn off the critic and just let the words flow. What you end up with is a great big, really, really, rough draft. I only made it about halfway through the last NaNoWriMo I participated in, but when I went back to the story several months later I felt exactly the same way--the draft had major problems. I had refused to let myself read more than the last couple paragraphs of my previous day's work so that I couldn't get sucked into revising instead of writing fresh material. As a result, I had strange plot gaps, characters who changed names, etc. etc. But that wasn't the worst. The opening reminded me way too much of Romeo and Juliet, and the characters needed so much more development, and on and on and on. But I had a really interesting central character who was well on her way to finding herself, and some decent material in bits here and there. And so I started to tinker with that.

You can't expect a novel that you write in one month to be genius on the page. A textbook from a creative writing class I took one summer quotes British author Gabriel Josipovici as saying, "Ten pages a day for thirty days gives you three hundred--and then you rewrite it seventeen times." You're only on rewrite #1. Don't be so hard on yourself.