Writing According to Lara

Oh, now, don't be thinkin' that you are gonna get some good advice on how to write, how to get a literary agent, or how to get published. Naw. That's on someone else's site who knows what they're doing.

I know why you've come here. You come to commiserate with the bottom of the literary heap, or get a confidence boost as to how far you've come in comparison. I know it, you know it. Let's just get past it, shall we?

No, Batman, I don't know what I'm doing. I see all these people on NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org) with synapses, outlines, notes, research, story boards ... and I think to myself....WHY? I mean why can't I just write and write and write for 30 days, see what I have, keep the good stuff, pitch the bad and fill in the missing pieces? But only if I wanna?

When I was a kid, I wrote and wrote and wrote everyday without NaNo! I had no idea where I was going, what I was doing. I wrote during study hall, I wrote instead of eating at lunch, I wrote when I got home. Then I got up and wrote some more. Did I write for anyone in particular? No. At the time, the only thing I wanted to write about was hockey (Anne will tell you there was a Barnabas Collins/vampire fascination, but let's not complicate my trip down memory lane, ok?) Specifically, the Chicago BlackHawks Hockey Team. ALL MEN! Phil Russell and Dale Talon and Keith Magnuson and Darcy Rota and Danny O'Shea. All I needed to do was create a couple of 20 year old women and I was off to the races. Well, a PG sort of off to the races. But it was hot to me and every 100 handwritten pages or so, I wrote something that sounded like real people having a real conversation in a real place that I created. It was heaven.

So this is how I will approach NaNo for this year. I shall not worry about tomorrow. I will just write and hope I can remember that childhood enthusiasm that sustained me day after day, week after week, month after month, now that I'm older....but perhaps not as wise.

Writing According to Lara

http://larachronicles.blogspot.com/2008/10/writing-according-to-lara.html