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Deathless prose

Thursday, 24 November 2005 11:22 PM

I have, to this point, created 30908 words of fiction in the month of November.

And it's all deathless prose.

Yes, every word is deathless, in the sense of being zombie-like, undead, breathing with a particular non-life that makes the internal editor in me weep, bitterly.

But then again, having pushed through to the second half of the NaNoWriMo adventure, I can attest to the value of having set goals that appear impossible but are attainable. My book looked excellent at the start, and its excellence daunted me, so I wrote little. The little that I wrote was not good, and then the writing became bad. And then truly bad. I mean, vomit-inducing ickiness. Real trash. I cringe even now at the thought. I will never be able to read entire pages of this crap.

I kept going because of the deadline, and because I'd been so public about having signed on for this challenge. I could not permit myself to back down. Also, I didn't want to back down. I wanted to push through.

So, I had to come up with words. To come up with words, I had to make up stuff to write about. Pull things from air, from between couch cushions, from the space behind my fridge.

Now, to my surprise and delight, the words are starting to form into ideas that are not quite bad. Some are intriguing. Others are good. Stuff that had been floating around in my head, things I'd wanted to write about that I had not planned to include in this novel, are now finding a home. And not just any old home, but one that really works for them and works for the book. It's a funny synthesis, borne I guess of pressure and deadlines and desperation.

At 30-some thousand words I'm still behind schedule overall, but the holiday weekend continues and there's time to catch up. More importantly, I'm on the trail of something that could be sweet.

Oh, and the chocolate gun? (Please see the comments of my past NaNoWriMo posts if you don't know about the chocolate gun.) I tried to introduce it today but got side-tracked again. However, my latest insight/angle on the main character opens opportunities for the chocolate gun, in a big way. I'm going to bring it in tomorrow for sure, if for no other reason than to at last have it in the book, ready to go off in the third act.

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