In Which Sarah Refuses Orthodoxies of Several Kinds

[dr_pretentious]

Nine longhand pages, most produced after 1am by candlelight. Why candlelight? Because I'm out of lamp oil, of course.
600some words straight into laptop, most produced during write-in.

I understand the benefits of privileging quantity over quality in an exercise like Nanowrimo. And yes, the 1st draft must be shitty, no matter how it gets produced. But a lot of the standard word count boosting strategies that are in common use by my fellow Nanowrimo cultists just freeze my brain up, even though I know there are other people who feel unlocked by them. I'm quite content to fail, even to fail laughably, on the first pass, but I don't have it in me to try things I know take the story in the wrong direction. There is a difference between writing a rough draft and, on the other hand, writing badly on purpose. Thinking that I would have to write badly on purpose in order to make 50K by 30 November has been intermittently paralyzing over the past couple of days.

The story got unstuck again the moment I said to myself, well, I'd still like to hit the 50K mark by the end of the month, and I'm still aiming for that, but I'll do it my way or not at all. Practice, failure, and play are acceptable. Acting in bad faith is not.

I think I just blew it as a Nanowrimo cultist.

Comments

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

write it anyhow and keep it...it may become the seed for a breakout story.

you're much better than me...I can't even do NaNo...I'm too phobic about being caught up in a cult! I mean, the people I know personally who are participants seem okay, at least on the surface, but...

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The story's sound. Promising the story that it was more important than the word count has made a huge difference, just in the past 24 hours.

I don't know that I'd do Nanowrimo again, but I'm glad to have tried it once.

Orson Scott Card says that writing 100,000 words will teach you more than any MFA program can. MFA programs are an easy target, and I think he overstates the case, but the guy's got a point.

And I think if Nanowrimo had been around when I was in high school and I'd done it a couple of times back then, I might not have been sucked into the far more pernicious cult of academia.

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

yeah, well... if it's any consolation, OSC's editor and I had a chat the other night in which I mentioned his disdain of MFAs and she dismissed his opinions quite readily. We talked about your work, too, as a matter of fact - the teaching, the learning to write fiction after years in academia, the struggles entailed in getting manuscripts to a manageable size...she was quite sympathetic.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Why, yes, that would be significant consolation!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you about Ender's Game. I liked the short story, but the novel Card expanded it into, not so much. I haven't read any of the others in the series. Mostly, I like OSC as a writer of short fiction. Back when I was a teenager and dinosaurs roamed the earth, Card's short stories were among my big influences, though not as important to me as Harlan Ellison's.