2,675 new words today for the WIP (work in progress). BAM! That’s pretty damned productive, if I do say so myself.
I’m trying to make up a little ground since I didn’t work on MAGNOLIA at all yesterday. It’s day three of NaNoWriMo and already I’m a few hundred words behind schedule. I was up late last night working on my CREEP synopsis, of all things (and it’s finally done and polished, thank GOD… and can I just say, there’s nothing more horrible than writing a synopsis), so there was no time to figure out what Matt, Jason, Sam, Rita, Finch, and Shank were up to in the uppity, history-rich Seattle neighborhood otherwise known as Magnolia.
I love first drafts. I really do. There are no parameters, no guidelines (except for the point you’re trying to make in the scene you’re writing… or, should I say, plot point, har dee har har). In a first draft, you have permission to write like the wind. Run-on sentences, comma-itis, cheesy dialogue tags, overstating, clichés… bring it on! The story’s coming out, and that’s all that matters. It can all be fixed later.
I sat down tonight intending to write a break-up scene between my two protagonists. It was a slow start, but I pushed past it. The next thing I knew, two hours had passed and I had two thousand words. And guess what, they didn’t break up. Somewhere along the way, the argument veered into something else entirely, and now they’re moving in together.
God, I love it when that happens. Isn’t it the most amazing thing when your characters smack you upside the head and do something you totally didn’t predict?
For me, it’s one of the best things about writing fiction. I get to constantly surprise myself.
Life is but a dream. Rejections and all.