NaNoWriMo Day 7
So you’ve stuck with it for a week. Good job!
If you’re doing the 1667 words per day to keep up, you’re at the 10,000 word mark. Does it look like what you thought it would at this point? If you’re lucky, the answer is no.
The thing about writing 50k words in a month is that to keep up the pace, you have to run faster than your internal censor can walk. That little inner voice that says, “Are you sure about this?” or, “It’s not good enough yet to write down” or, “You need to figure out what the next step will be first” or any of the other hundred things that slow you to a crawl.
Sometimes that inner editor/censor is right, but November isn’t the month to have a discussion with it. That’s what the other eleven months of the year are for. Something wonderful and fun and exciting happens when you keep that little voice locked out for the month: your story plays with you even more than you play with it. It wants to have fun, and you don’t have the time to not let it.
And that means that the story will often go somewhere you didn’t expect it to. Often that place is somewhere you never would have been able to come up with while sitting in front of your planning notebook trying to lay everything out. Maybe some of those places will end up being dead ends. That’s okay, too, but it’s not something to worry about in November unless the story ends up getting too far off track to salvage. In that case, go back to the last place it made sense or the last place you were happy with it and pick up writing from there.
In my first NaNoWriMo completion, I wrote an entire chapter that ended up being deleted. Were those words wasted? No: the story outgrew them like a child outgrows clothes. You wouldn’t say a child wasted a pair of pants by growing taller, would you?
The same thing happened with an entire subplot. Even at the time, it seemed pretty tenuous, but I let it stay that way. Revision passes are when you start making words earn their place and I say again, those don’t take place in November. With each pass, that subplot got whittled away. Sometime around the 11th or 12th pass, it was lifted almost completely, and something that at one point occupied several pages scattered throughout the book is now a few sentences. Were those words wasted? Nope. Several years later, they’ve re-emerged in a different form as a book project of their own.
In another post, I wrote about digging while you write. In that case, I wrote over 400 words to come up with the one sentence I needed. Were those words wasted? No, unless you say a miner wastes dirt by digging for the diamond.
What you write won’t be wasted, even if you don’t end up using it. It might pop up elsewhere, and even if it doesn’t, it will still linger in what remains the same way that the scent of a candle still freshens the room even after you blow it out. When you let your story go, you let your story grow, even if you end up pruning some of the blooms along the way.
The best way to be creative is to create. It really is that simple. No long books. No expensive seminars. No sitting around complaining about how hard writing is. You create by creating.
So if you’re starting to feel like what you’re writing is a mess because it’s not what you thought it would be, that’s okay. That’s more than okay, actually, because it probably means you’re creating something you didn’t think you could before you started.
If it’s a mess, it’s because you’re scrambling the eggs to make the omelet. That’s where you should be at this point: breaking the eggs, dicing the peppers and onions, grating the cheese, and throwing it all together. If your peppers aren’t lining up with the onions, that’s fine: they’re not supposed to. Keep cooking up something good, a couple thousand words at a time!
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