November 28, 2011

the last leg

Here I am, less than 4000 words away from the finish line and I find myself unmotivated.  I have almost 3 full days to complete this, and I could easily knock this last 4000 out of the park in one sitting but I find myself having a hard time staying focused.

My story has been a random, uninteresting series of events.  Well not completely.  There have been a few ah-ha moments where things work out.  I guess I never really found my voice and I didn't plan out specifics, not to mention the original idea I had got away from me and I ended up somewhere I didn't expect.  But you know what, I just went with it.  Every time I had a crazy idea, I just went with it.  I scrapped whatever I had tentatively planned for my characters and just went where the wind blew me.

The good thing about this is once I got going, I had to be really creative to make it work.  I challenged myself.  However, the bad thing was it was always tough to get going during each writing session.  I moaned about having lack of momentum or even a consistent thought at times.  It's been an interesting process.

Regardless, it's taught me a lot.  I remember reading an interesting blurb by the guy who created NaNoWriMo and him describing how some years he had amazing tales while others were train wrecks and I wondered how someone who knew what to expect for the challenge would not be prepared for each subsequent year.  Then I realized that some years, when you commit to an idea, it unravels itself like a ball of yarn falling down a staircase.  It wasn't what you had planned, but it happened anyways and you don't have the luxury to go back and start over or even edit.  Is there a great idea in my story, yes; does it need a lot of work, hell yes.  But either way, I got to challenge myself and write a story that is different from the rest.  And in the end, it was exactly what I set out to do.

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