Excuses, Excuses

Some of you might know about National Novel Writing Month, a month-long writing event (well, yeah) during which participants attempt to write every day to reach a word goal of 50,000 words.  Well, this year I decided to participate for the first time and...yeah. Not going so great. I'm hopelessly behind, and the weekends I'd planned to use to catch up I spent doing pretty much nothing.

See, me and writing have a complicated relationship. Sometimes I'll get super-inspired and just write for an hour until I get it done, when I really love the idea and I have free time. Slightly more often I'll get inspired, start writing a bit, then leave the piece alone for a week or so and then finish, revise, etc. Or I'll just randomly start writing stuff and let myself be inspired as I write and then edit for coherency later. I should probably mention these all generally only work for short stories.

What happens with anything more major (incuding novels) is that I start out with an interesting but vague idea, which then sits in my brain where I'm constantly plotting, characterizing, adding details, perfecting it before it's even written. And then when I sit down to write, it's hard to get excited about more than just a couple parts. Maybe I'm excited about the story as a whole, but getting to the interesting parts ends up feeling like slogging through scenes. And that's not fun.

The story I chose to finally (attempt) to get on paper for NaNoWriMo was one I've had rolling around in my mind for...about two years now? It's changed a lot since its initial (extremely vague) conception. And then I cannibalized interesting elements from stories that were just not working at all. I'd say the story in its current general form, with the right feel, has only been around for five or so months. But that's beside the point. In all that time, I never felt like I knew enough of the story to start writing it down, because some piece of the plot, or of a setting element, or a character, was always missing. I got stuck in a long string of "I should figure this out first"s. And the thing is, I really don't know how I would write without having any clue what to write.

So when I finally ended up with a fairly coherent outline, I felt if I was ever going to write it down, this was the moment - I knew everything I had to write, so the actual writing should be easy. Nope. In all that time figuring out everything about the story, I lost passion for it. Right now, I'm much more interested in another idea of mine - but with that one, I know hardly anything except one character. They'll be so much fun to write about if I ever figure out what happens to them in the story - but by the time I do figure that out, I won't care as much and I'll move on to something else. It's a vicious cycle, and in the end, it ends up with me getting hooked on brain crack.