(no subject)
Getting harder to pump out the five hundred. Too humid to think. Too tired to care. Gotta feed the quota.
That was my rallying cry every morning during my first National Novel Writing Month challenge. Every morning I would roll over, hit the snooze alarm and think, Gotta Feed the Quota.
Because that was how I thought of it. When you’re writing fifty thousand words in thirty days, you’ve got to write about eighteen hundred words a day to make the deadline. One average, that is. My second go round, The Amazing Adventures of the Sensational Squirrelman, I would go a couple of days at a time without writing anything and then spew out five, six thousand words at a go. One marathon Saturday near the end I churned out nine thousand words.
So it’s kind of a matter of give and take, I’m learning. You have to accept that sometimes it’s not there. Sometimes your brain needs to recharge. But it’s just like theatre - you have to trust it’s there. That somewhere inside you the story lies, just waiting for a chance to be told. You’re the conduit for it to be told, but you can’t force it out. You have to accept that some days it’s not coming out no matter what you do, and some days you’re just the machine that feeds it from where the stories lie, waiting to be told, to the waiting page. You as a person don’t exist - only the story. You’re a slave to its will.
Otherwise - if you try and force it, or deny it passage to the page - you’re in for a world of hurt. You force it to your will and what you wrote won’t ring true - in fact, it’ll be crap. Or if you decide you don’t feel like writing today, well, the story has other ideas. Because it fills your every spare thought, pouncing to your forebrain like a hungry predator, voracious for any time that can be used to further the plot or get to that specific scene for that one perfect line of dialogue. It will not let go, ever, until the story is told.
Call it inspiration. Call it passion. Call it obsession. Call it Eunice.
Whatever, it’s the drive behind the artist, the writer. The Muse Wants OUT! The Tale Must Be Told. And you can’t think about anything else, can’t read without thinking about it, can’t eat without thinking about it, can’t watch television because you could be writing, could be letting the story out faster than it is being let out now.
I could write Squirrelman in 500 word increments daily and I wouldn’t run out of story for months. I prefer the weekly installments, because then regular readers know when and where to look, and don’t feel like if they miss one day they’ll be lost, like on a soap opera. And keeping the Talyesin’s Daily 500s freeform I can write about whatever feeds my Muse, and feeds the quota.