NaNoWriMo and Me
Taking a break tonight from the NaNo writing as my head hurts and my plotting brain is sort of stuck. What seemed like a pretty straightforward tale is taking on a life of its own, but not giving me a road map to share the direction with me. I'm sort of going along for the ride, and as the writer that's a scary place to be. It's like the only way I get to see how this particular movie ends is if I write the screen-play. Scary and exciting all at the same time.
It's also hard, no... make that difficult to shut off the internal editor. I know when I write a crappy sentence, or a miserable paragraph and I want to go back and fix it. Make it better, because crap like that exposes me for a fraud. At least in my own mind, it does. Which is a conceit of me, and I would suspect of most writers as well.
Then there is dialogue. I hate writing dialogue. It's tortuous for me to write. It is akin to trying to pull painful slivers out from under a fingernail while having my hand in a cast, and covered with a mitten. Everybody sounds the same to my eye, and my reading ear. Which means I need to work on it, but since it is so difficult to do, I don't want to do it. And since I don't consider myself a novelist, I only have to struggle with it one month a year, because I tend to shy away from fiction the rest of the year as well.
So, when I think of all of this and I ask myself why I do this every year, the answer is simple. It's fun to do. It's fun to create a challenge that won't get me killed and try to meet that challenge. It's fun and I do enjoy the creative process. I can whip out blog posts and short memoir pieces without really thinking about it very hard. Those are easy, and relaxing. At least for me they are. But fiction? That's hard. Not impossible, but hard. Which is a good kind of fun to tackle even if it is only once a year.
It's also hard, no... make that difficult to shut off the internal editor. I know when I write a crappy sentence, or a miserable paragraph and I want to go back and fix it. Make it better, because crap like that exposes me for a fraud. At least in my own mind, it does. Which is a conceit of me, and I would suspect of most writers as well.
Then there is dialogue. I hate writing dialogue. It's tortuous for me to write. It is akin to trying to pull painful slivers out from under a fingernail while having my hand in a cast, and covered with a mitten. Everybody sounds the same to my eye, and my reading ear. Which means I need to work on it, but since it is so difficult to do, I don't want to do it. And since I don't consider myself a novelist, I only have to struggle with it one month a year, because I tend to shy away from fiction the rest of the year as well.
So, when I think of all of this and I ask myself why I do this every year, the answer is simple. It's fun to do. It's fun to create a challenge that won't get me killed and try to meet that challenge. It's fun and I do enjoy the creative process. I can whip out blog posts and short memoir pieces without really thinking about it very hard. Those are easy, and relaxing. At least for me they are. But fiction? That's hard. Not impossible, but hard. Which is a good kind of fun to tackle even if it is only once a year.