If you take a looksie in the sidebar, you’ll see my NaNoWriMo word count thus far. As of the writing of this post, it’s 5263. I was able to punch out about 1500 words tonight, after slacking for the most part the past few days. I let my analytical thinking get to me – I paused too long between writing sessions, and my brain started nitpicking. “Ah, that doesn’t work. That’s wrong. This could be better.” Blah, blah, blah.
As a way to try and re-motivate myself, I checked out No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. It’s by Chris Baty, the mastermind (crazy mind?) behind the whole NaNoWriMo thing. After reading about 40 pages, I was ready to leap back into the novel. He stresses repeatedly: don’t analyze, just go go go! I particularly liked a quote from Ernest Hemingway that he used to get the point across:
The first draft of anything is shit.
That’s certainly comforting, because my first draft is pretty crappy! 
Oh well. After jumping back into it tonight, a new plot line opened up which I hadn’t really expected (at all). It’s kind of cool, really. Now that I’m actually trying to write a novel, a lot of my assumptions about novel-writing from the past have been shattered. In particular, I used to think that when novelists would say, “I didn’t expect that to happen at all with my characters, but it did!”, I’d think… bullshit. You’re a novelist. You knew the whole plot before you started writing! You all do! Novels don’t just “happen”; things don’t just “happen” without you planning it.
Nonsense. I’m finding that if you get in the groove of writing fiction, and just let go without worrying too much, things do happen on their own. You start clacking away on the keyboard, and before you know it, there’s a bunch of stuff staring back at you that you did not expect to happen at all. Things that hadn’t even crossed your mind before. It’s a pretty awesome feeling. I won’t say this is easy – as noted before, my analytical brain is trying to beat me senseless – but this is turning out to be a bucketload of fun, and also rather insightful.
Don’t hold me to that, though. By the end of the month, this could be me, along with many of my fellow NaNoWriMo-ers:
I think you should take a break from the writing and – have fun make a bun
I had to post the recipe and make you bake the buns AND post a picture proof of it!!!!! *lol*
Come on – take the challenge
Mrs Lifecruiser: I may do that. I don’t know if I’ve got all of those ingredients at the moment!