I put off posting an update on my dismal, thankfully unofficial NaNoWriMo progress. I’m sure I’ve written a lot of words, but I’ve been deleting them over and over again. What do you do when you get to chapter two and everything starts falling apart?
1. Have an awesome writing buddy. (Mine is my friend Elysia, who was also one of the first readers of HOPE IS A FERRIS WHEEL. Elysia writes in practically every genre save for non-fiction and is incredibly insightful about writing in general.)
2. Keep bashing your head against the wall. With breaks, of course, because if you bash your head against the wall forever, then you’ll just end up killing yourself. But I’ve prided myself in writing every ding-dang day this week, even if it wasn’t productive at all and I ended up deleting those thousand or so words the very next day.
3. Have a playlist! To almost quote Madonna, “Music makes the plotlines come together.”
I’m not very good at giving advice, and I haven’t even crawled out of my chapter 2 hole yet, but I think these three points are pretty solid. I’ll let you know next week if they actually worked.
I write solely on the computer, so whenever I get stuck, I love brainstorming/free thinking with pencil and paper and just writing everything that comes out of my head, even if it makes no sense or even if I already know half the stuff I write down. Also, long walks with good music! (:
But regardless, writing every day is an awesome thing to accomplish. Lots of good luck – I’ll have snacks and confetti waiting at the top of that hole!
That’s a good idea! I have lots of notebooks I use for brainstorming but I haven’t touched them in a while. I think I’m going to give this a try. And yay for snacks!