Nanoing this year has felt a little weird, but a good weird. I feel really free. I've accepted the idea that I have enough writing skills that I don't have to rewrite something to death. If I go back through, it'll be to clean up details, not to 'polish.'
If I think about it in terms of rice, I like brown rice way better than the super-polished stuff anyway. Wild rice is full of awesome too. Somewhere along the way I stopped learning and improving when I rewrote something and started making my writing worse. I've had this proved to me many times now. So, enough.
That gives me much more time to develop new work and play in new stories and revisit ideas that I loved but sadly polished into a little bead that had about as much life in it as expired corn starch. That allows me to move on to the next story, whether it's the next in a series or the next in a whole new universe. And if I want to enrich a story with details or something, I'll have more time to do that if I'm not obsessing on the line by line on an extensive polish.
It's made me a little more careful about how I write those words as they land on the page, but it hasn't slowed me down all that much. Again, I've got over 43,000 words on the 16th day of Nanowrimo, and I haven't been writing non-stop. We've done housework and gone to meetings and such. I've been living a pretty normal life. I've been sick too.
I can do this. I can be a full time writer with this process, and produce more good stuff that I've ever dreamed I could. Plus, I'm not going back and ruining what I do write. Bonus!
But I'll always need my critique group, I think. I need to keep a sharp eye on what I miss, and what doesn't work, especially if it's a pattern with me. I already know I could do a lot more with setting. So as I go forward, I'm going to keep hunting for those weaknesses, and I'll depend on the Lucky Labs and INKers to help me out (and keep me motivated too.)
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