When I went to bed last night, the word counts for my NaNoWriMo buddies were 539, 447, and 0 (granted, he’s west-coast, so I may not know). Me? All of 78 words added. Beginning week 3, Sustain week, the grind. And judging from all our performances, it’s the wall.
Speaking on my own experience, I opened up the document, looked at the outline, which ended with “Chapter 33 – Lin And Steven Negotiate”, typed “Chapter 34 – ” and stopped. I had no idea what the next chapter was going to be. No idea whose perspective it was from or any sort of plot. After a couple minutes of staring blankly, I walked away from my computer.
It’s not like I couldn’t write. I was inspired to do a blog entry that day, when I was expecting to go dry for a while. And I’m writing this blog entry now. I’m doing all of this instead of working on my novel. Recently, I commented on how writing the novel wasn’t really fun anymore. And I gave that emotion some thought and had another realization.
My NaNoWriMo profile identifies me as a “Pantser”: writing with no planning and flying by the seat of my pants. And that has worked out very well for me. I am always excited to see where my characters want to go. I only have detail in my head for one future scene and how to get there, and I have various long-range events that may or may not ever come to fruition. They all depend on how the short-term scenes play out.
However, lately, something has changed. In prior weeks, I would always be thinking about the story and what was coming up next. These last couple days, I haven’t given a single thought to the story. Yesterday, I only had my thoughts about the upcoming scenes from a few days ago. Today, I sat down and I had nothing.
So, how did I get over that? I chose to do some editing. I jumped back three chapters and read what I had written. In the process of doing that, I learned that my story isn’t actual shit, which I was increasingly convincing myself it was. I fixed some basic typos, changed some phrasing, and ended up with an additional 78 words for the day. More than that, I encouraged myself that this is a story and the story isn’t over yet. These characters still have things to do.
Today will be a long day at work, but when I get home, hopefully I will have the refreshed energy to take on another two chapters. Verbum Vomite!
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