Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Waiting for Inspiration: a Nanowrimo story

Greetings from the West Coast. It's 5:24 in the morning in San Francisco, and I am waiting for some inspiration to write my next scene in Burning Candle. Can you tell by that pic that it's not going well? Since I'm still on New York time, I have mainly succeeded at getting writing done in the morning (not like I'm sleeping properly or anything! - damn you, internal body clock!), but today, I've been staring at a blank page since 4:45am. I'm guessing updating this blog doesn't count towards my daily writing goal? Crap.

Whoever realized all those pep talks were necessary to keep people mtivated after the first week of Nanowrimo is a genius. I read them faithfully. Writing is such a solitary experience, but doing Nano has underscored the fact that I'm not alone in my efforts. Up until this week, I've been moving along pretty steadily, even with the demands of my full-time job and the San Francisco convention we're prepping for. I'm now at just over 29,000 words. The story is a VERY, VERY rough draft - do you hear me people? Long ways to go to a final draft. I can hear Laura Miller's sigh of relief that there will be one less crappy Nano novel sent out on December 1.

Anyway, for the first time, I wrote the entire synopsis of a manuscript, timed by the historical events of my heroine's life, and that task was very helpful, for the first two weeks or so. Not so much now. Should I be worried? Should I be canvasing the hotel looking for my inspiration, which has suddenly gone missing? Or, do I call it a morning, and crawl back into bed? Decisions, decisions....

For those of you doing Nano, stop by and leave a comment about how you're keeping motivated and meeting your writing goals (or not!) No, as I mentioned above, it will NOT count towards your daily word goal either, but you might provide some motivation and much-needed inspiration. Happy writing.

2 comments:

Michelle Gregory said...

i don't have anything inspiring to say, esp since i'm having trouble being motivated, too, and i don't even have to write the full 50K to reach my goal. just hang in there.

Anita Davison said...

Too many pics of people with heads on desks in front of PC's Keep going! You'll thank me in the end...

Time flies when you're having fun, or writing novels.

It's been a tremendous twelve months. A new job and health issues have impacted my writing time, but I'm still at it, trying to wrap...