Keystroke vomit & the dreaded second week
#NaNoWriMo, Days 12 through 15
Previous: Gratitude & Good Enough Writing (Day 11)
I have been spending a lot of time lately beating myself up.
Because of that, I’ve been hiding, instead of writing my semi-regular post in the NaNoWriMo 2013 collection.
I was vain enough to think I was impervious to the dreaded NaNo week two, where plot lines become dead ends, and characters fall dull and flat into the ghost towns of the old west, like they were shot by the bad guy dressed in all black.
Of course, my novel isn’t about ghost towns, or the old west, unless you would put California in 1996 in one of those categories.
I’ve been trying every method I know to get unstuck. I could hear Julia Cameron’s voice, speaking through The Artist’s Way about writers block, “you’re not blocked, you’re empty; go get yourself full.”
I tried to heed the advice of a trusted advisor, who said:
Take the whip out of your hand, my dear. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t complete this challenge. (It isn’t?) It’s creating mania and depression. Write in a way that is loving to yourself.
I wrote Morning Pages and got mired thinking I had to create an elevator pitch for my novel, which doesn’t even have a legit name yet. I was stuck trying to figure out where my main character was going to spend her first night in San Francisco, and that it should be big and messy and dramatic: a crack house? a pot-growing house, that gets raided by the police? a sex-party house? I kept thinking how my story was dull, trite, and cliched, and I had to get my girls in more trouble, take it up a notch, but I just couldn’t make my girl spend the night in a police jail cell when she doesn’t even smoke pot.
On Thursday, Nov 14th, I hit an all time daily writing low: 236 measly words.
Friday, November 15th, I was still ahead of my word par, but not for long if I didn’t get any words on the page. I figured by this point I would wake at 5am automatically because my body clock had somehow already adjusted to my early morning routine.
Four fucking a.m. And couldn’t go back to sleep.
Fine, whatever, I told nobody, because everyone was asleep, I’ll write.
I politely call what I wrote Friday morning, between 4:30 — 6am, keystroke vomit. 3,418 words worth of garbage that came sludging out of my brain, onto the page. (Yes, I made that word up.) Many of those words articulated the self-assault and had nothing to do with my characters strife.
I finally tired of typing, and ended with this line:
And all of these fucking beautiful words count.
Today, writing came a little easier. I didn’t worry about writing what should happen next, in this chronology, but took advice from my NaNo ML, to just write whatever I wanted to, right now.
Nov 11 word count: 20,018
Today’s ending word count: 29,995
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