Day 10

These days seem to be flying by. I can’t believe it’s already day 10 of my unofficial participation in National Novel Writing Month.

Another late night (they’re going to be the death of me — or my writing; no, not my writing), but I still got up at the usual time and sleepily wrote. It was a little slow going (through eyes that really just wanted to shut again), but the momentum I picked up yesterday in my problem scene carried through to today. I actually realized that yesterday I had left out one important part of the scene, so I fixed that and started to move forward until I realized that I’m at the point where I have to write some completely new scenes to fix the plotting problems I had run into during my first draft. I knew this day would come. I feel kind of like I’m doing a puzzle, fitting together all these story elements so they flow in the most exciting and entertaining way, while also keeping the story clear for young readers. I’ll need a good working brain for that one, but I did figure out some of it this morning. How do you work out if your story is flowing ok? Charts? Storyboards? Or just a really good memory?

Outside of my writing, I wanted to make note of two comments my blog received yesterday. First, congratulations to Tricia, who is participating in NaNoWriMo and has already reached 31,000 words, more than half of her 50,000 goal. Great news! Well done and keep it up.

Second, thanks to Ellen Booraem, author of the great new book The Unnameables, who posted a comment giving me a great writer’s block tip that she uses. You can find it here, but basically, she said that when she’s struggling, she opens a new document and writes stream-of-conscience style in the viewpoint of her character. She says she always finds out some new character points or plot points. Thanks for sharing, Ellen.

Anyone else got tips to share?

Write On!

 

2 Responses

  1. I’m finding the only way I can carry on with my NaNoWriMo novel is to just pretend I actually did fix all the problems in the previous days’ problems and keep writing in whatever new direction those brilliant yet-to-come fixes point me toward. I hadn’t realized until I started NaNoWriMo (my first year!) that I did a TON of going back and rewriting as I went, and that it really stopped me from moving forward!

    Love the writing tip from Ellen. Do you think I could use it to count toward my daily word count? 🙂

  2. Yeah, BelleEnchanted, I know what you mean. When I wrote the first draft of my novel, I’d always start my next writing day going through what I wrote the previous day, and I found I wasn’t getting anywhere with the story. Like you, I finally stopped looking at the previous day’s work and went full speed ahead to the end. It was very satisfying. Those fixes can wait til the revision.

    Good luck with the rest of NaNoWriMo. I’m not sure if words written using Ellen’s tip will count, but we can pretend they will.

    Write On!

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