I’m so pleased to have accomplished my goal of doing NANOWRIMO again this year. (The last time was 2009).
Sounds easy enough, but honestly it is a challenge. I challenged myself too by writing in a specific genre – romance.
It was harder than I thought.
I had an idea, and my characters and a bit of back story. I knew what the conflict would be and, of course, how I would resolve it. So I had a pretty complete outline and character sketches to work with. It was still a real challenge though.
Halfway through I found myself second guessing everything and wondering what the hell I’d been thinking. I pushed through anyway and got my whole story arc down, bad dialogue and all!
And let me tell you, it is work to get the proverbial ‘butt in chair’! Fellow writers I know struggled, worried they were writing “crap” but focusing on word count and quantity. I worry about that too sometimes, but I know all too well perfectionism hold back more artists than probably anything else.
While I was in Kauai at the end of October, I reread my rough draft of my 2009 NANOWRIMO manuscript and was pleasantly surprised! I had the same doubts about that one too and I put it away for a long time probably because I was afraid it would be crap.
In 3 years, I’d never even peeked at it!
Then I read it and was genuinely pleased. Does it still need to be further developed? Of course. Is there stuff I’ll end up cutting? Of course. But there was a lot of good stuff there! My thought was, “wow, this doesn’t suck!”
Anyways, I won’t wait three years to read through my manuscript. Three months is more realistic. I’ll see if I want to move forward with fleshing it out and polishing it up!
Hopefully it won’t suck!
