Quickly, quickly

First off, happy thanksgiving.

I was comatose after all yesterday’s eating and wrote neither a blog post nor a word of NaNoWriMo novel. It’s OK, I’m still on track thanks to some high volume writing over the previous 5 days. Just shy of 40,000 right now.

Because my plot has been feeling flat, my characters dull, their lives mundane, I’ve adopted a new strategy: writing by storyline rather than chronology. The idea is to follow one idea through to completion. For example, follow poor Sarah and her love life. The upside is that I’ll atleast have one plot line that reaches a conclusion. The downside is that the writing won’t be informed by all the crazy things happening in the other plot lines. Those interconnections are often the richest part of the writing. They are the places where I find the most delight since I never would have guessed that the tuna sandwich in scene A would be critical to resolving her love life in scene B or the finding the murderer in scene C.

In other words, I am not convinced this is the best approach but I know no other way of getting some sort of completed story arc. It’s either this or write another 50,000 slow-paced words, to come to truly understand my characters, and to help reveal where their fates will ultimately lead.

Meanwhile, I share this emergency double-delivery of Waxie’s outside my office. It’s an popular item in cubicle life and an item that already appears in my story. It’s also a reminder that my life could definitely be worse.

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