time qualifies the spark and fire of it
I often compare writing to exercise. It’s something I actually quite enjoy doing, but for some dumb reason, I convince myself many a time that I’m just not interested in it today. And so I don’t do it. And then today becomes this week. This week becomes this month. And time passes in a blur of BBC DVDs and hours skulking on the Internet. Because… somehow… that is a better occupation of time? And more worth the breathing minutes than exercising my muscles or my brain?
But then… every once in a while I wake up from that oblivion. I think, yeah, I can do this. I am going to do this. No should… because, really, should is a stupid word. An excuse. A way of separating oneself from the blame of not doing a thing. If we think we should, well that’s somewhat of an effort, right? Wrong.
It doesn’t hurt, of course, when the world presents a challenge to ruffle the feathers of my ego and prompt me out of said lackluster effort. 50,000 words by November 30th. Hell yeah. I am, if anything up for the challenge of verbosity. But, if I can couple it with a story… so much the better.
The thing about this novel writing challenge is the only rule is words. So… all other rules go out the window. There is a sweet liberation in that. I like bending rules, especially in literature. And I like getting lost. It’s always amazing the paths one finds in order to get back home again.
I am finding a lot of my sentences to be dialogue. I’m not sure if that is because I can write speech more rapidly and thus accumulate more numerals to log into that absurd counter thing. Or… if it is because this story is about relationships… and what are relationships if not based in conversations? But… they are also about memories. And we seldom recollect the past in one sequential story. We hop from incident to incident in the retelling of our histories. So… I find that’s how I’m writing this. Hopping all over the place.
It might not make sense to anyone but me at this point. Or ever. Who knows if I’ll pick it up for the second round? Hopefully I will… but, well, at least I’m remembering how much I like to write.
Oh, and I think I’m going out for a walk this afternoon, too.
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