chronicled & illustrated

And on the Seventh Day: YOU CAN’T REST!!!!!

I’ve only just begun today’s writing, but I wanted to post this NuancNanoTip because it’s one I believe in greatly and which I’ve already used this year to my advantage.

I went into this November with a setting, characters and a world in a mess. Several plot threads were obvious and necessary but each day when I tried writing about one of them, I would get stopped. It seemed boring to write and like it would be dull to read (those two things go together!) and one day I let it keep me from writing altogether. That’s a HUGE no-no! Some old tapes wound around in my head telling me that I had to write this as planned or I’d be somehow hurting my efforts. That not writing it was backing away from something hard—and therefore, necessary.

Luckily, I find it pretty easy to ignore those kinds of mental lectures from the past.

I remembered several things. I remembered that it’s just a first draft. I remembered that if it’s hard to write, it might be because I need to change what I thought I was going to write and write something more interesting! That I might need to let it simmer a bit, find out more about what’s happening with all the characters and that there might be a twist-in-the-action I hadn’t thought of yet, that would let it be more fun to write and read.

So, I left in the partial muddle of a scene and skipped ahead to other things.

Surprising things have been coming from my fingertips; things I hadn’t planned but which are anything but boring to write. And just this morning, I’ve been able to re-approach the dastardly scene from a different angle. I feel so much better about it.
I was ready.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 11:36 am and is filed under NaNoWriMo, fiction, writing, reminders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.