A Long, Drawn-Out Story

If you arrived here through Blogging Tips to see how often I update this poor little blog. . .Welcome to my World.

Was it a ploy to get you here through trickery? Not really, it was more sinister than that. It was actually a ploy to make me update the thing.

If you arrived here by other means, Welcome to my World.

At the time of this writing, I have no title for this post or even a clue what this post will be about. A blog post should be specific and cover one topic—or so I’m told. I don’t always follow the rules though. I’m a writer; we’re also told we can break the rules—to a degree anyway.

I think I’ll cover a few thoughts I’ve had lately, a few blog posts I’ve read and why they may have sparked these thoughts, and I may even throw in something useful and meaningful. Don’t hold your breath, just read. . .or click away, you have that option too.

My Life as a Writer:

Once upon a time—is that too cliché? Well, once upon a time there was a writer who loved to write fiction. She had stories, scenes, characters, plots—you know all the stuff a writer is supposed to have.

One day as she was traveling along the writing highway, she came across a blog post, an ad, or maybe it was a hobo with a sign, but whatever it was it said something like, “Make Money Writing.” What a concept, huh? So she clicked (which means it must have been an ad or a blog post and not the hobo with the sign) and she discovered she could make money now—not down the road after writing her great novel, going through the edits, revisions and submissions, she could make money now.

What was the catch? It was all non-fiction. Hey no problem. She can write during the day and make money, and write her great novel at night. It only takes balance and a good juggling act.

Well it turned into all non-fiction writing. The muse didn’t mind at first, she needed a break. She didn’t have to plot, scheme, or come up with a fancy way to describe a decadent hot caramel, chocolate latte. This was cool.

But one day, while taking a nap in a tree, the poor muse fell out and broke both her arms, her legs, and cracked her skull. This infuriated the muse because she had to take more time off to recover.

Years later, which wasn’t that long ago, the writer realized how much she missed the muse, but the muse was still recovering—a very slow process.

Once the muse discovered that she was needed, she started making progress towards recovery. Some days, just for amusement though, she would torture the writer and not give her anything to say.

The moral of the story? There really isn’t one. It’s taken much longer to heal the muse than it should have. Enter NaNoWriMo.

My First NaNaWriMo:

This is my first year to participate. I knew something dramatic would have to happen to fully recover the muse and get my butt planted in the seat with some good old fashioned fiction.

Before NaNo, I didn’t really have a clue what I would write for my novel. I had a character idea in my head from a writing prompt I did over the summer and that little lady has bugged the crap out of me.

All of the blogs I get time to read is done through email—it’s like magic—they come in the middle of the night—or early morning and go directly to their specific folder. This way, if the headline catches my attention, I can read it. If it doesn’t grab me—well I get to it eventually. One catching headline appeared in my email. I had to read it immediately; it was related to NaNo, which would start soon.

As I was reading through it, I thought I was screwed. The advice was solid and made perfect sense, but I hadn’t planned for any of it. But, as always, Larry has a solution. Of course I sort of botched his solution and came up with something I could do. (I’ll link to the post in a minute—patience grasshopper.)

Larry believes in having a plan, as opposed to organic writing (and you’ll get his feelings on both if you read his blog enough). I was going in organically—it worked before my muse got broken, why won’t it work now? Well, because the muse also matured as she healed. She liked the idea of a plan. Okay, great! I’m screwed now because I’ve never written an outline or planned a story out. I’ve let it flow—organically.

Well, with barely two days left to plan for NaNo, I made a simple outline—it contained a beginning, a middle and an end; no juicy stuff in between. I was thrilled with it. I’m still thrilled with it. The first few days I was just happy to be writing my passion again. As yesterday dawned (Day Four) I started having a small panic attack. I needed a scene change, a direction or something and it wasn’t planned. I was doing timed sprints with two other writers. We were going to write for twenty minutes this time—and I had nothing.

What did I do? I decided to just wing it—or go organic as Larry calls it. Well something amazing happened. At the end of 20 minutes I had written 1640 words. I have no idea where they came from, but one thing I did notice as I was writing and I couldn’t stop it—my character took over and changed my plan.

The moral of this story? I really like the idea of a plan and using an outline. I will learn to do this better. But at the same time, you have to let your characters go where they’re going too. Don’t beat yourself up if he/she does something you didn’t have planned out.

The link? Oh, you’re waiting for the link. You have no patience do you?

Okay, I’ll give it to you, but you have to promise that you’ll read other posts at Larry’s blog. Why? Because I said so!  And the fact that he gives really solid advice is a plus too.

About NaNoWriMo – Three Ways to Thrive, One Sure Way to Suck

I promised links to a few blog posts didn’t I? Well, this one became such an epic tale, I should hold off sharing the others. Hey, it gives me another reason to update this thing in the near future—you can’t blame a writer for that. J

 

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