I'm having my first revelation about "longform writing." (I suppose I could just call it "noveling," but I'm all about using as many words as I can right now, in the name of reaching the pinnacle of 50,000 words.) When I finally went to bed last night at 2:00 a.m., I realized that while my story started with my character on a plane landing at O'Hare, I had only just gotten him to the point where he was driving away from the airport with a college buddy he hasn't seen in 20 years . . .
. . . And it took me 3,000 words just to get to that point.
It made me realize that when I finally go back to editing this epic, I am going to be excising ginormous amounts of text that simply has no purpose being there. I'm not worrying about that now, thank God. It's making me see that the true work of this is not so much the initial writing. It's not that hard to throw a lot of clay on the wheel; the real effort comes when I try to make that into something . . . beautiful? Hell, I'll be happy just to take "acceptable."
I had this whole revelation confirmed Friday afternoon when I had lunch with another NaNoWriMoer and her co-worker (who will undoubtedly do NaNoWriMo on another year). This is her fourth attempt at NaNoWriMo, and she's only "won" once. ("Winning," in NaNoWriMo terms, simply means writing 50,000 words by the 30th.) But she still has the experience of going through this, successfully or not. And she knows that what we're basically doing right now is figuring out where the hell our stories are supposed to start.
The thing I'm proud of in myself is this: I've been imagining for weeks that this story was going to start on that damn airplane. But you know what? If, during the editing process, I realize that it makes no sense to start there, I'm ready to jettison the whole scene. Hell, I'll get rid of all 3,000 words if there's a better way to do this. That may not seem like much, but I'm the kind of guy who — especially after he's envisioned something being a certain way for a long time — has a very difficult time adapting to a new reality. At least at this point I'm keeping an open mind to the possibilities of where my story will go.
Well, at midnight tonight, Susannah woke up all cheery. Laura brought her out here, and she gave me a sunny "Good morning!" despite the pitch-black evidence to the contrary outside our window. The break gave me the opportunity to update my word count. Mother and daughter have headed to bed now, and I'm hoping to get in another hour of writing before I call it in myself. I'm hoping to continue to get ahead of the game this weekend; I hear it's very necessary to survive Week Two.
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