Melting (or, why Nanowrimo is kicking my butt)

Nanowrimo total, as of yesterday: just a smidge over 9,000 words.

It’s humid today, which seems to be the weather pattern that really kicks my butt at the moment.  As a result, I’m finding it very difficult to actually focus on getting any writing done.

I’m also beginning to think that Nanowrimo is a goal that’s not going to be met for me this year.  It’s not even a matter of whether I can get 50k written in a month.  Hell, I could sit down and spend a couple of solid days just churning out rubbish to make word count.

The thing is that I don’t want to churn out rubbish.  I’m enjoying exploring a new fictional world, but it feels like I haven’t developed enough of the world itself to be able to write anything that’s going to be of any use.  I just don’t see the point in churning out words that I’m going to toss in a few month’s time.

And yes, I’m aware that this is the same discussion I’ve been having with myself about whether to do Nanowrimo or not in the first place.  I think it can be a very fine thing – it’s a good way to generate a zero draft of part of a novel.  It’s a good way to just play with words, to see if you can write 50k words in a month.  I’ve “won” it twice before, so I know I can do that.

But is doing it just because I can a good enough reason?  Yes, I want to write this draft, but I also want it to be a useful draft.

I might keep on pushing forward.  This might just have to be a lost day of writing.

But I might just pull back a little, spend some more time working on building the foundation of this novel.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.