Home - is where I want to be / But I guess I'm already there /I come home -
she lifted up her wings /
Guess that this must be the place...
- Talking Heads, "Naive Melody"

Monday, November 2, 2009

National Novel Writing Month

Oh God, you groan, not another one? Well, yes. I need a break from all of my delightful (to me), neurotic (unquestionably) Tethyn characters and their penchant for getting into dire situations and saving the world. I want to write something fun, and a little bit silly, to stop taking this whole bloody project of writing so damn seriously for a while. I find myself worrying about this, if I am going to encourage bad habits by not even really trying to write something good?--but I'm going to write it anyway.

Some world-saving may ensue anyway. I seem to lean toward that sort of thing.

I have spent the past couple of weeks writing up an outline of sorts--mainly a list of set pieces I knew I wanted to include, stitched together by a few bare-bones requirements from my various genres--and writing up character backgrounds (for which those questionnaires included in some role-playing games are actually pretty useful), figuring out who these people were and how they were going to interact.

The first day, Sunday, was easy; I was up at 4:30 (stupid time change), and everyone else was out for the morning, so I blasted through the first few sections of my plot and ended up with more than 5,000 words. Monday was, of course, a bit more challenging--for one thing, I was exhausted--but I plugged away early on, and at lunch, adding enough to my total to keep me happy. We'll see how things go from here....

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

It did not occur to me until just this moment that basically what I did was write a doc plan for this novel--the exact same thing I do all the time at work.

This strikes me as a very smart thing to do. That I didn't even realize it was what I was doing, strikes me as really dumb. I think I will call it "internalization of good writing habits" for my ego's sake.