Writers Untie!

Behind (but still trekking on)

As of five minutes ago when I got distracted by the internet, my word count was 7,535. I consider this a major accomplishment, as when I sat down to write about an hour and a half ago, my word count was about 2,000 lower.

That established, if I intend to finish on time, I have to write 2,235 words every day between now and the 30th. Really, it's not so bad. That's only 600 or so more words per day than the average if you stay on target from the beginning. It's only the end of the first full week of NaNo; I've just been getting warmed up.

I was struggling with writer's block for a few days this week (and a nasty bout of "let's find things to do besides write a novel!") when a fantastic piece of advice came across my e-mail. Something that as a usually liner writer, I hadn't even considered:

If you're finding a scene boring to write, cut it and skip to the good part. Set something on fire. Have zombies attack. Note that boring is not the same as hard. Really great scenes can be very hard to write and take a long time, but if you're sitting there going "god, when will this be over," make it be over. You indeed have that power. It's your novel.

I was getting stuck having a couple characters in an extended and rather dull dialogue in a hospital room. I thought that I had to write my way out of this before I could go on. It hadn't even occurred to me that I could leave them hanging in the ICU reception area and move on to another part of the plot progress. Granted, I will at some point have to get my protagonist out of the hospital and into her house, and again out of the house and on a date (with some action in between!), but for now, it's been awesome to give myself the freedom to break out of the expected chronological order and just write what's coming at the time.

I'm hoping to get back on the time-order bandwagon soon, though. I'm getting anxious to know what happens to my characters as their lives unfold, even though I'm artificially manipulating them out of order right now.

Labels: NaNoWriMo

posted by Anna Clare @ 7:21 PM