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Showing posts with the label NaNoWriMo

Writing Can be Like Herding Cats

I've heard other writers talk about projects that refused to go in the direction they intended/wanted, and obviously I've had ideas morph from one thing to something slightly different. However, I never really thought I'd become a victim of this particular phenomenon since I'm a dyed-in-the-wool "pantser." I have never outlined anything I've written except when forced to do so in school (and even then I always wrote the paper and then back engineered the outline). I suspect it is a combination of however my brain is wired, and the fact that, to me, outlining spoils the fun. Why would I want to bother to write something when I already know what happens? Don't get me wrong, I have written things with a vague idea of what happens, or else there was some sort of guiding principle keeping the thing on the rails. An example would be a short story cycle in which each section occurred on a day of the week and each had an overriding theme (love, loss, betrayal,

What I Learned from NaNoWriMo 2017

I had signed up for NaNoWriMo eons ago, and by eons I mean over a decade. And yet, despite the initial, and recurrent, desire to take part, I never did. First and foremost, it's taken me years to come to terms with the idea of sharing the odd goings on which call my head their home. Secondly, there has always seemed to be some perfectly convenient excuse, as there always is, for why it's not convenient to do it now . But despite the eternal headaches of holidays, schoolwork - and this year, actual final exams - coinciding with NaNoWriMo, I decided to shut up and just try it this year. Something about feeling that I had such lovely, and valid,  excuses built in for any possible failures, made it seem somehow less frightening to think of doing so. So what if I only hit 20,000 words, I thought, that's way more than I had, and I can always blame it on school. In the interest of honesty, I must admit, I started with about 4,000 words I'd previously written. But since I am a