The road not taken

Hi everyone. Sorry I'm so bad about blogging. I did manage to ascend past 25,000 words tonight, so I'm more than halfway toward my goal of reaching 50,000 words by Nov. 30. Too bad there are only 8 days left in the month! I'm going to need to really step on it. Here are some thoughts I had recently, which I wrote first in an e-mail to a fellow NaNoWriMo author:

"I had thought, when I first started doing this, that this was no way to write a novel and that it would just be an exercise in motivation and time management, but now I think this is actually a really good way to write a novel. This way, when I go back to make revisions, I'll already know how it ends and where the characters are going, rather than trying to add in scenes that might not matter in the long run and focus on a character that I end up dropping later on. It gives me perspective, I think, and allows me to focus on the overall story and work out the details later."

Isn't it amazing the kinds of inspirational realizations that come to someone when she's writing her first novel in only a month? In previous attempts I've made to start some books, I've focused too long on every part, writing and rewriting it to make it perfect. Since I've had to rush through this novel, I, of course, have not had time to do that. In fact, I kept a beginning in there that I soon decided I hated, just because I didn't have time to go back and rewrite it. And you know what happened? A couple nights ago I decided maybe the beginning isn't so bad after all. I still have a lot of changes to make to it, but I'm going to keep some of what I would have deleted. If I had deleted it, I'd have to write all that all over again.

Something else I learned about a week ago as I was writing was that writing this story has reminded me of those "Pick Your Own Adventure" books. Every choice I make, every direction in which I take my plot, is the result of a path I must choose over dozens of other options I might have picked. That had not occurred to me until last weekend, but it was funny that a fellow writer (though not for NaNoWriMo) I met for dinner on Monday thought the same thing about her writing, even before I had mentioned it. We both basically had the same realization at the same moment.

I'm so glad I decided to take this risk and devote much of my November to writing this novel. Whether or not I make the deadline, it's still been worth the journey traveled.