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November 04, 2005
The Value of Taking a Break
I learned this last night in a vastly different way from having this lesson before.
I was working on my novel and it was really, really tough going. Every 400 words or so, I would IM Dave saying things like:
Sally says:
Grrrrr.
Sally says:
Stuck.
Sally says:
917 words to go this evening, and I am stuck.
And then another 400 words later:
Sally says:
Almost 3/4 of the way done now.
Sally says:
uuuuuuuurrrrrrgh.
And then I thought, "Well, helloo, Stupid. Why don' t you take a break? Nobody said you had to write all 1667 words in one sitting. Take five minutes and then come back to it. "So I did.
My goal for last night was 6000 words total, to put me a little ahead of the game. 5001 is the magic number to beat at the end of day 3 (1667 words a day), but I want to be a little ahead, so if I come upon a 500 word night, I won't have to scramble later. When I wrote that second set of IM's, I was at about 5500 total words. And stuck.
My stuckness was partly due to not having much idea where I wanted to go next with the story, but also involved my having just written a scene with traces of brilliance. It has the bones of being something really cool if I can work on it and craft it. But NaNoWriMo isn't about editing and crafting. It's about getting the sucker down on paper so you can have something to edit later. Much, much later. So what I really wanted, it turns out, was a little time to admire myself and feel good about what I had just managed to accomplish. That's when I took the break.
When I came back to things, and really, the break was about stretching and scratching and getting a drink of water and some more tootsie rolls, and referring back to the image I had selected to sort of focus on and guide my thoughts for the evening's writing (I may have checked my email and poked around a couple of other blogs too), I sat down and started writing what happened next. And the next thing I knew, I was at (drum roll, please)
*
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(Is the suspense killing you yet? I'm good at suspense. I'm a novelist.)
*
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*
*
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7680 words.
I had managed to conjure up an additional 2000 or so words in the five minutes I took away from the laptop.
I should have figured the take a break thing out earlier, of course. Incubation has always been my favorite step of the creative process. But I was so focused on the goal that I had forgotten process existed. How very, very like me. Why do I have to keep learning the same lessons over and over and over again?
Posted by sally at November 4, 2005 11:03 AM
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