The first day of Nanowrimo was not so bad. I didn't know what I was going to write, but I arrived at the page and people started dancing. Not literally, of course, but they showed up too. Characters I had not imagined, had not thought of in advance, suddenly appeared and pushed their way in. Good, right?
Here's the thing: I'm not sure if I like them and I don't think I like where they're taking things. I've started writing a novel that is slow, deliberate, reflective. A woman looking back on her life, trying to sort out what went wrong, what went right, as she deals with a mental illness in her older age. Fine. I'm okay with this, for the most part. Except that the sheer pace of nanowrimo doesn't really allow for moody, carefully crafted sentences and quiet pauses. But I can work around that, I see the bigger picture. So, fine. Old woman, contemplative and all of that. Then suddenly, she thinks back upon when she met a former flame and he is....living in Los Angeles and he's in a band. !?!?!?!?! How does this happen? I don't like it. Why are they going to the Sunset Strip to see a show where she will meet him for the first time, at the urging of her gorgeous but manipulative painter friend. It is getting trite and off-track and I'm only three pages in. The characters are mere cut-outs, flat, expected, stereotypes. Is this laziness on my part? Is it a thread I must really follow to the end to see where it goes?
So. What to do? The name of the nanowrimo game is to write, unedited, dashing toward the 50,000 mark. In fact, the whole point of nanowrimo is to dash and not stop to ask these pesky questions as the stopping and asking can turn into days, weeks, months of no writing and much over thinking. Yet. It seems foolish to me to not sort this out now, at the very outset. Otherwise, the entire book will be crap. Will be not what I had hoped it would be. I am tempted to delete the last 800 words and recapitulate. Re-stipulate. Re-do, undo. Shouldn't they be going somewhere else, somewhere more interesting, more memorable than the standard LA muck? Or is it just standard to me because I live here? I hear the painful mantra of many past writing teachers, urging me to write what you now. I hate that. So. Here I am. 1,078 words down but hating just shy of half of them.
Do I re-write or stay the course on this so-soon faulty, creaky ship?
