This weekend was a disaster NaNo-wise. I got up on Saturday full of good intentions, sat down and… nothing. Nothing would come out. I started to force a few sentences and I suddenly realised ‘I have no idea what I’m doing’.
The problem, of course, stemmed from a lack of planning. I had carefully mind mapped and planned the central themes of the book, the beginning, the characters, their introduction and final goals. What I hadn’t planned in sufficient detail was how I was going to tell the middle of the story. I’m unsure of both my characters’ motivations and the time line of events.
Not knowing exactly what was going on meant moving forward was like mentally fighting through treacle. I had encountered the ‘writers’ block’. I had found something similar when writing my thesis. About half way through I suddenly lost track of the overall message by concentrating on the details.
I was a bit depressed on Saturday because of this and had a bit of a moan to Saf. Luckily she had the, obvious but welcome, suggestion of just stopping, sitting down and thinking about it. Work out what was going to happen, to whom and when. Do it away from the computer, away from distractions and without any sense of urgency.
On Sunday morning I had a nice long bath and sorted things out. I worked out where I had to get to to write the end of the book and resolved to just write over the middle and get there. I also came to terms with writing crap. The middle of the book, as I wrote in the previous post, is crap but that’s OK. I know that I can sort it. I just need to get the damn thing feature complete :). Once it is out, re-writing and re-plotting the middle will become a pleasure rather than a chore because I’ll have a full plot set out, in my head and on paper.