Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A month of crazy

Well, we all do crazy things. As November approaches, and NaNoWriMo with it, I realize that my days of fairly regular blogging will no doubt come to an end. NaNoWriMo is a crazy program in which you write a novel (well, sort of a shorter novel, checking in at only 50,000 words) using only the 30 days of November. I've only done it once, but I'm hoping to again this year. Which is why I don't think I'll have a lot of excess time to be blogging several times a week.

A big problem I've been trying not to think about is this: I do not have a plot. I think that maybe perhaps I have sort of something I could use as a plot-type thing, but it's really not all here. Last year I had a similar problem, but it ended up coming to me, and I was able to write a story in about 56,000 words and be done with it. But I'm not sure that such helpful inspiration will strike me twice. My younger brother (did it last year, doing it again) keeps on going on about his story, and how he's got it all figured out, but I just don't work that way. Prewriting was always my least favorite part of English--sometimes, in fact, it was so problematic that I would write the whole essay, and then go back and write an outline based on what I'd actually written. I'm not suggesting that that's a good way to go, I'm just saying, that's how I roll.

Which means that when November comes and several thousand people are out there, cheerfully writing stories that have been outlined in their heads for months, I'll be tapping at the keyboard, killing off random characters, adding a lot of adverbs, and trying to get my word count up. It's a sad, sad month I'll have ahead of me.

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