Nanowrimo, day seven.
The brilliant sheen of a clean page. The
crushing weight of it.
It is day number seven. I load
up nanowrimo.org and see the not so delicious curves of the zero – that
starting point for each day – just staring back at me. Today’s a tougher one for some reason. My motivation seems to also be residing
somewhere near a zero level of its own.
That said, I’ve done ok. I’m
nearing 11,000 words (and this blog post should take me past that point easily
– yes, I’m cheating and writing my blog post in my nano document. Like I said, no motivation. I had to start somewhere to get those words
flowing, right?). That puts me at an
average words per day somewhere right around where it needs to be for me to hit
my goal. I’m not one hundred percent
positive, but I think that I may already be past the word count I hit in my
tragically failed 2012 nano attempt.
That in and of itself is a big win for me.
The first four days were smooth, easy even. I was absolutely shocked how well the words
started flowing once I got over that first morning. It’s why I love nanowrimo. Somehow, it just *works* for me – worrying
more about quantity than quality, trying not to allow myself to revise as I go,
just push push push for that word count.
It makes me feel like a writer when most days I feel like all that I am
is a “reviser.” (And yes, I know how
important revision is to the life of a writer.
Doesn’t mean that I have to love it unconditionally.)
My document is a barely contained entropic mess. When I get stuck with one story, I move on to
something else – to a completely different narrative, to a memory, to some
poetry… Yesterday morning, I started an
exercise writing traditional 5-7-5 haiku and got a little out of control – now there’s
a page and a half of haiku in the middle.
It’s the nice thing about “cheating” at nano – when I get tired of
characters or get stuck into some crazy plot corner, I can move on to something
else. (I honestly have no idea how I did
it in 2011 without cheating. Even if the
novel sucks, I’m secretly proud of myself for making it through that.) I put three asterisks on the left margin of
anything I would like to return to – first lines, mired plots, answers waiting
for their questions… Scrolling through
the pages quickly this morning, there are at least ten spots in the left margin
where I see asterisks. It’s a good “problem”
to have. Anyone who reads this blog has
a pretty good idea of how absolutely scattered I am. Working this way seems to really work for me.
That said, I don’t think I have anything actually finished yet. (as in first draft finished…) The majority of my document so far is one
story – maybe four thousand words? It’s
a story about friends in college at its most basic level. But it quickly became about a lot more for
me. Loyalty and secrets… It was just working and kept going. I was ecstatic. But when it stalled was when the motivation
became harder. I really want to push
this story somewhere. It was walking
along with me so smoothly… I feel a
little betrayed by these characters right now.
Silly but true.
I have the beginnings to five or six stories, maybe more. Some of them are only a sentence or two. I have some really long stretches of prose in
broken lines that may someday be poetry.
Some swatches of prose poetry. A
couple non-fictional recollections and musings…
In short, I have a whole lot of little bursts of somethings that I am
hoping, hoping will become cohesive in the long term. In the short term, I let them be whatever
they are. This month, all they have to
be are numbers.
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