I failed to hit the NaNoWriMo deadline.  Big surprise.  So I get no winners’ certificate, no little badge that I can proudly post on this blog.

What I do get is more written than I ever had before.  I’ve always enjoyed writing, but lack of motivation stops me doing enough of it.  The deadline, even though I’ve missed it, made me JUST WRITE.  I’ve listened to so many writers give that advice: don’t get it right, get it written; apply seat of pants to chair; and so on.  What has happened is that ‘just writing’ has helped me shape big things like the overall plot that previously I assumed should be dealt with in outline form.

I’ll finish this novel, even though I won’t get a certificate for it.  At the moment it’s a mess of disjointed scenes, a barely coherent cloud of incident and characters with no clear timeline and no continuity.  The more I write, though, the more small incident I put down the more the bigger picture comes into focus, at least for me.  I start writing a scene, then halfway through come to the knowledge that it won’t survive in the edit, but I keep writing it anyway, maybe from a new perspective, maybe with a new assumption that didn’t exist in the first half of the scene.  I can go back and fix these glaring inconsistencies, but the reason I’ve changed tack is that I’ve come up with something better, something I’d never have come up with in an outline or just by idly thinking about it.  This has been quite exhilerating and I plan to keep it up.

As for the promised video, I shot one but it’s a pretty pointless affair so I won’t even edit it.  You’ve got the story.

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