Not doing Nanowrimo this year...

[elfs]

I'm not doing Nanowrimo this year because the first five days were eaten alive by my election volunteering and webmastering for some local races, and I'm a little burned out. For the first time in a few weeks, I did manage 2,300 words this past Friday, and another 1500 so far. I even wrote 400 last night while Kouryou-chan was getting ready for bed.

I like Nanowrimo even on the years when I don't do it. I was reading an LJ that I'll keep anonymous where the author was whining and complaining that she doesn't like Nano because, as she put it, "Creativity doesn't come on command."

I'll say this again: Yes. It. Does.

Creativity is a skill. As they're fond of reminding people over at Julliard, the deciding factor between a terrible performer and a great performer isn't innate talent, it isn't creativity, it isn't luck: it's practice. The strongest correlation between musical skill and professional success had nothing to do with innate ability and everything to do with the sheer raw number of hours one put in practicing.

Sorry, this is my biggest pet peeve with writer wannabe's and people who dis nano. You cannot be creative if you don't show up at the typewriter (even the kinds with the television on top) and start banging away at the story.

And "creativity exercises" work. Stuck? Get a big sheet of paper, write down your current stuckness, and then come up with ten ways the characters can unstick the problem. Ten short paragraphs. Pick one. Write it. You might end up throwing it away, but it's better than doing nothing.

I bet I throw away more "driving to the story" chapters (writing a bunch of stuff about the characters before the story actually begins, backstory that eventually gets chopped) in a year than most anti-nano grousers write at all in that same time. Driving to the story has to be one of my worst habits, although it does give me character grounding for later.

Comments

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I've been feeling a little surprised by the pace I'm writing at.

I even dared delete a couple of thousand word which threatened to cut the story short.

But the two biggest things that made it seem I could pull it off?

First, my brother's explanation of just why our schoolteachers were so incompetent: he's an educational statistician. I got my English Language and English Literature O-levels, and I got one of them a year early, but there's so much they never seemed to bother with.

Second, and bunch of people saying good things about the shorter fiction I wrote, earlier this year.

So here I am, with 27,000 words on the clock, and planning to chop out a bit again, but I know what's coming. I know what the story needs.

Half a world away, there's another man in love, and he's going to do something really stupid.

[bldrnrpdx.livejournal.com]

Half a world away, there's another man in love, and he's going to do something really stupid.

I'm already interested in reading it.