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Day 2

Count: 3029

Ideally, I’d like to be at about 5,000 words by bed time tonight.

This is among the worst prose I have ever written in my adult life. I’m pretty sure the story has been done a dozen times, and in one month time, I’m going to end up with a 50,000 word shit.

Usually, I go back, edit and re-edit as I write. This may be a bad habit. I have a very very difficult time writing stories above a length of, say, 2,000 words. They collapse under the weight of me editing and re-editing. I hate making major changes to the story, ever, because I’ve already spent so much time getting it juuuuuust right. Sometimes, it turns out, when you get to a certain point, major changes to the beginning are necessary in order to make the right ending work. This is the way things work.

Layman’s description of the difference between extroverts and introverts is this: introverts think to speak; extroverts speak to think.

I think maybe the same general duality exists with writing. Some writers outline vigorously, prepare, plan, research: they think the write. Other writers simply start writing, it seems like the ideas they’re using come from the beating heart of the universe itself, and only stop to think when they *really* have to. They write to think

I think my problem is that in editor mode, I’m follow the introvert paradigm. In writer mode, I just try to let space time channel its magic through my autonomous fingers. Editor mode tends to be more powerful than writer mode, but can’t itself produce much text — all of my large stories are savagely victimized in the conflict.

If anything, what NaNoWriMo is doing, is allowing me to let my editor brain sit this one out, and wait as my writer brain churns out a mountain of clunky mess.

I can only hope that at the end of this, when editor brain gets full reign, writer brain has left it something to work with.

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