(no subject)

[amarra-jade.livejournal.com]

What do you do when your writing kills your enthusiasm for your story? As far as I can tell, my options are:

1. Push myself to 50K with my current plot. This is what I did the past two years, but I was miserable the entire time and didn't feel like much of a winner.

2. Put my current plot aside for now and write something strictly for the lolz so I can enjoy myself and I won't feel like I have to write well. Seems like a good idea, but I'm not particularly good at writing humor.

3. Keep working on my current plot at my own pace. Again, seems like a good idea, except that my normal pace is incredibly slow, so I might never get it finished.

4. Quit NaNo. I really don't want to do this. I hate giving up, and I get more writing done during NaNo than any other month of the year.

Yeah, I know I'm probably being way too pessimistic about this, but I'd appreciate some advice. Thanks in advance.

Comments

5: Try dusting off your old plots and looking at them again.

[vinawrimo.livejournal.com]

I have a question. What about the last two plots you wrote? What happened to them? Did you write the entire arc and finish the stories or did you just hit 50k and then scrap them?

Asking because I've done Nano three times now. At the time I was doing them, I felt they were disasters. The writing was crappy and purple and the characters were unreal and flat. But now when I look back on them, I find the characters have grown into real people. Some of the prose (very little of it, but some of it) really turns me on. And the plots are fucking amazing and compelling. I would love to rewrite them/write them well someday, though this year I'm doing a totally new plot.

I find that there are two pleasures in writing - creating something completely new from scratch, and laying the finishing touches on a finished product. The problem with Nano is that it tries to do both in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Good luck! Whatever you decide, definitely do not go with Option no. 4. It's not about winning - there is no winning in Nano. It's about the struggle between entropy and creation. And every person who slogs through it and finishes is a tiny victory for the writing spirit, which is the spirit of discipline and hard work, not the spirit of inspiration (that's a myth). All us crazed typing monkeys will produce Shakespeare, even if it takes us an eternity. ;D