I’m out of here till Monday….
BUT FIRST these encouraging words from best-selling author Sarah Gruen.
Sarah Gruen (author of Water for Elephants) is an intrepid
NaNoWriMo participant–so much so that they asked her to send out a mid-course pep talk, intended to buck up the laggards whose word count was um, lagging. Count me in that bunch. When the time came, Sarah herself had fallen behind. She had a number of good reasons–and don’t all of us? But the writer’s answer to “good reasons” must always be “SO WHAT? When the going gets tough, the tough get going, right? So here’s what she wrote:
In the wee hours of last night, when I was trying to figure out how I could possibly give advice to people about their word counts when mine is so abysmal, I realized my problem…
I’ve been ignoring my own advice, and everyone else’s too. You know, the “no editing” rule, and the “it’s okay to write areally bad first draft” rule, and the “move around the story as much as you want” rule. I was dutifully handing that advice out to my nano’ing friends, but I wasn’t taking it myself and I was (and am) 5,640 words behind where I should be according to my little spreadsheet. But today, I am going to jump around and write only the fun bits! I’m going to write about food fights,
and disastrous sex, and escaping in-laws, and apes with unlimited credit! I’m going to write about roach-infested motel rooms with strippers upstairs and ways of using JeffersonStarship’s “We Built This City” as revenge! (Sorry Grace, I love you, but…)
And whenever one of those scenes starts winding down, I am going to ditch it without so much as a sayonara and look for the NEXT fun scene. The transitions can wait. And instead of avoiding writing by going to various gossip sites that some person *cough* (Joshilyn) who-shall-remain-nameless *cough* (Jackson) got me addicted to last time she came to my house, I will visit them at the end of the day as a reward for having written my words.
I can do this. WE can do this. However far behind you are, take comfort in knowing that there is somebody else out there in the same boat, and look for that next fun scene. And then the next. And if that doesn’t work, set someone on fire. In your book, of course.
Bravo, Sarah
Meanwhile, back to Thanksgiving… if you have any word derivation battles over the dinner table, try this. It’s the definitive dubious-word-origin killer.
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