NaNo Day Seven -- and the End Of WEEK ONE

Every great work, every great accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement comes apparent failure and discouragement - Florence Scovel Shinn

Yesterday was a bad writing day for me. I had absolutely no desire to continue writing my NaNo story. I'm still not in love with it, but I think it has potential. I am going to do the big NaNo no-no (say that five times, fast) and go back to edit some of the scenes. Yes, this will slow production down BUT right now my production has ground to a complete halt, so it can't be any worse.

My plan is to apply the Donald Maass from Chapter Five of his Breakout Novel Workbook called "Adjusting the Volume". I believe my biggest problem thus far is that I'm telling the story instead of letting the characters tell it for me.

Maass says to "...pick anything at all that your protagonist things, says or does. Heighten it. Make it bigger, funnier, more shocking, more vulgar, more out of bounds, more over the top, more violent, more insightful, more wildly romantic, more active, more anything."

That's exactly what I need in many of the scenes I've written. I hope that doing so, that making my characters stronger and more real as a result of the exercise, will make me love the story again and be able to move on.

My writing goal today is 2,000 words, as always. We'll see if we get there.

Whenever I get too low, I just watch this video of a laughing baby (thanks to Brenda Coulter for pointing the way).

You can't stay down when a baby gives a big belly laugh.

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I've managed to eke out 543 words so far today.

I now have a grand total of: 13,610 / 50,000