I just got to 14,736 in ye olde NaNoWriMo book. I probably have some more left in me for later on tonight. Which brings up something interesting I’ve discovered about me.
I write in sprints. I can do a quick 2000 words here and there, followed by a break of an hour and another sprint of 2000 words. I don’t know if I could do it all day long or not (alas, having a full-time job does not allow me to experiment to see if this is the case), but it would be nice if that’s the case.
One thing I definitely know now. THIS is what I’m SUPPOSED to be doing. I might not get paid to write, I might never get fame or fortune or anything like that, but I am definitely a writer. This is where I find joy.
So after a bit I’ll probably write some more. However, one thing I wanted to say before I do so is that while I may go through some of the details of the story plot, I’m not going to put up any of the writing that I’ve got (not even on my NaNoWriMo page). The reason being is that I never show my first drafts to anyone.
The first draft of anything I write is always raw and uncensored. It’s like taking a lump of wood and just hacking away at it for a bit. Sure, it can come away looking a bit like a sculpture–but it’ll be rough and if you pick it up you’ll get a splinter. So I never put any of my creative writing up unless I’ve at least read over it and smoothed it out with sandpaper.
And this explains a bit of my writing style. I’ve written several novel-length manuscripts, but I only have one (and almost the second) ready to go. I can write a book in a month, but it’ll take me a year to edit it. That’s just the way I am.
Hopefully, the end product is better because of that. And you probably know it is. After all, you see enough of my typos in my blog posts to know that that’s exactly what my first draft manuscript is going to look like too…
UPDATE: Total now stands at 16,492. That’s 32.9% of the way to 50,000 (so we’ll just call it 1/3). Whew…finally getting good too :-)
