I completely failed to go to the library to write today, which was partly due to life choices but mostly, if I’m honest, because London looked like the inside of a sewer today and I was not going to leave my bedroom unless someone paid me actual money. Happily I do also have a desk in my bedroom and despite being tripped up by the existence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a ready supply of Hula Hoops, and my own inability to behave in a disciplined fashion, I still managed the allotted words in the allotted time.
I’m warming to the characters now, even if I’m not wholly content with the pacing or my own prose. I think – I know – I am over-using adverbs in the most egregious manner. It’s a bad tic I have at the best of times, and it is out of control at the moment. The reliance on cliché and stock phrasing is, for once, a character-based verbal tic, but the adverbs I have to own up to being all mine.
Happily I am nearing the culmination of the first act, and a long chapter which allows me to pull out all the stops in terms of characterisation for at least one character who hasn’t had a lot of page time yet. It should also be easier to write, because it’s one I dreamed up a long time before I started writing this, and have talked through a number of times.
Every year NaNo reminds me that writing is not an ivory tower experience for me and that bouncing ideas of people repeatedly and rephrasing an idea while telling several different people about it helps me to refine what it is I’m trying to say, but I’m afraid the narrative, the social narrative, is that ideas must spring fully-formed from your head like Athena from Zeus, or you’re somehow lesser. I’m happy to be lesser, since the fully-formed ideas often don’t stand up to the protracted kicking they’re likely to get later on, and as I’m writing this year’s novel in semi-public again, I’m getting a lot of useful feedback on what to change when I get to the second draft.
