Back in March I wrote about how I was so very psyched for Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo's offshoot program, and then I went and sucked very badly at it. Here's why:
Simply put, I don't write for speed, the premise that these programs are built upon.
I spent about two months planning and outlining my script so that on April first I would be ready to unleash my brilliant story upon the world in a mere thirty days, but it didn't happen because I can't work in a sheer volume capacity like I would need to to finish my script in a month.
I tried though, and I have the crappy pages to show for it. I wrote nineteen pages in six days and I hated almost every word of it.
As I wrote, knowing I needed to fill the page count quickly, I did something that I don't normally do, I wrote from the gut and the gut only. I started off by following my outline, but I quickly discarded it because the structure was slowing me down. So I started to improvise and I was getting my page quota accomplished but my story was going off the rails in a bad, bad way. Pretty soon what I had was unrecognizable and nearly worthless.
Once I realized that the wheels had come off of the process, I stopped writing for speed and tried to rewrite what I had. It was so far from the outline that I was ultimately wasting my time.
Finally, as the end of April neared, I scrapped the mess that I had and started over. I have, in the two months since, written the same 20-ish pages while following the outline and it is much better (opinion) while still holding to the ideas and structure that I had originally planned (fact).
So while disappointed that I failed at vomiting out 100 pages in 30 days, I feel that I learned something valuable about myself and my own writing process and ulitmately this is a good thing.
I tell my students that knowing what kind of writer you are (habits, preferences, obsessions, etc.) is as valuable as work ethic. Once you know how you write what you write, then you can get to it.
ReplyDelete