If you keep up with this blog, you'll know that lately most of my posts have just been about what I'm doing, namely focusing on this little thing called NaNoWriMo.
This blog post is going to be a little bit different. I'm going to write a bit about keeping up with word count, and the true meaning behind a rough draft.
So, you have a story idea. You go into November, armed only with an outline, a couple of rough character sketches, and your trusty laptop. And you find that you are falling behind on words. That 1667 words per day has become a monster, a final boss that you have to challenge.
And you can defeat it!
NaNoWriMo, in addition to being a great writing exercise, is perhaps the best way I have found to teach yourself the true meaning behind a rough draft.
Rough drafts are meant to be just that: Rough.
I never really believed in the school of writing really rough drafts. I always paused over sentences, phrases, and you know that one word that always manages to stay just out of your grasp? Yeah, all of those, combine, were my greatest enemies.
NaNoWriMo makes you reach beyond that. It forces you to realize that even though you are a writer, not everything that you write is going to be amazing. In fact, not even any of it that you should write is going to be an amazing best-seller on your first try. Having to write 1667 words in a day requires you to throw away all inhibitions about whether or not the word you use is the perfect word for your character's action. You don't just "hmm" and "hahhh" about whether its the right word, you just write it and hope for the best!
So, in closing, I suppose that there should be a moral to this story, and the moral is right as rough a draft as you can. Otherwise, 1667 words will take you all day to write.
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