Writing on the other side of 50,000 during National Novel Writing Month feels totally different. I'm genuinely surprised by this. There is this freedom I feel in being able to . . . well, write or not write. I found myself yesterday not feeling the need to write, but rather the desire. I was enjoying a long section of a journey for my main character, both the research of the places he traveled to and settling into what I imagined he was seeing, in the locations, and in the expressions on the faces of his traveling companions.
I've found an unwitting ally in writing such passages of journeys to places I have never been. If you can't write what you know, at least you can write what other people have known . . . and filmed . . . and put up on YouTube. After spending a fair amount of time over the last couple of nights setting up the itinerary for this journey, I found myself on Google Earth, studying the terrain, the features, the satellite photos of the areas Walt would go. And then I discovered, inside Google Earth, little YouTube logos which, when clicked, would open up a video in YouTube that the user had somehow bookmarked. Often, the video was taken in the very location on the map I studied. (And almost as often, the video had nothing to do with the location; why a stroll down Olivera Street in Los Angeles was bookmarked in the Canadian arctic, I'll never know. Bad GPS, perhaps?)
And all of a sudden, I was watching several videos made in airports and towns, getting a feel for the look of the roads, the foliage, the weather, any other features that could become details later on. Wow! An actual bona fide use for YouTube! Pretty cool.
Today is the last day of writing, and I really want to push past 55,000, but I've pretty much gotten to the point where I'll need to figure out the solutions to the tough questions that have been hanging over my head, some of which have remained unanswered for several months. I knew that November 30th would be a sort of Day of Reckoning, but I'm glad it's this kind of reckoning, rather than, say, having to figure out how to push out 10,000 words before 11:59 tonight.
The other major decision still to make: whether or not I'll bother attending the Chicago "Thank God It's Over" party on Sunday at Café Iberico. The selfish part of me says I deserveit; the introvert part of me says, "Why bother?"
Good luck to any NaNoers who are pushing today to reach that final goal! I donate some words to you.
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