I feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick.<\/p>\n
I was getting behind on my novel and wrote about 2200 words yesterday. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but if you have a full-time job, that’s rough.<\/p>\n
I think people who do NaNoWriMo are insane (that’s about 1600 words a day every day for a month).<\/p>\n
Doing 1000 words a day works best for me. It’s enough to give it some heft for the writing session, but not so much that I’m going nuts.<\/p>\n
I wish I were Neil Gaiman sometimes. It seems so easy for him, how he seems to be able to pop out good<\/em> material on a constant basis. Yes, yes, yes, I know. A) He’s talented. B) He went through that most rigorous of writing boot camps — working as a professional journalist. No artiste<\/em> temperament allowed. Put out good copy or don’t eat.<\/p>\n At some point, what it really boils down to is, “Just tell the fucking story. Your hindbrain will take care of all that stuff literature professors get orgasmic about.”<\/p>\n We don’t learn to write fiction in school. We learn what it takes to make a story, yes. We learn what makes a story rich and thick and good. What we don’t learn is the process<\/em> of putting all that good stuff into our story gumbo, and I think part of it is because in the throes of the process, it’s not entirely a conscious thing. I’ve never heard of a writer admitting to consciously saying\/thinking, “Okay, I am going to make these sharks eating away at the huge swordfish a metaphor for my struggles to tell a good story and my fears of losing my abilities.” I have heard, however, writers saying that their best stuff is when they’re so focused on the story they’re telling that the keyboard\/computer\/typewriter fades away and all they’re conscious of is being there<\/em> in the story.<\/p>\n In At the Foot of the Throne<\/em>, the novel I wrote last spring, there’s this recurring theme that I did not put in consciously. I needed a scene where the main character did something astonishingly foolhardy to protect the life of her King (and lover) because he had no heirs — something for the good of the kingdom.<\/p>\n What happened<\/em> was an encounter with a wild boar.<\/p>\n Throughout the novel, and I did not think consciously about this, the antagonist king is described as being “like a boar with a toothache” or some such wild pig comparative when someone comments on his anger or aggression.<\/p>\n I didn’t consciously choose the metaphor.<\/em> What I did was trust my subconscious to come up with all that and stuck to telling the story.<\/p>\n Now I am not claiming to be a great writer of fiction by any means. I’m not at all. At best, I am just learning to be competent. What I’ve really got to learn are editing skills — cutting away the unnecessary stuff and keeping the structure strong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I feel like I’ve been beaten with a stick. I was getting behind on my novel and wrote about 2200 words yesterday. I know, it doesn’t sound like much, but if you have a full-time job, that’s rough. I think people who do NaNoWriMo are insane (that’s about 1600 words a day every day for … <\/p>\n