In the spirit of a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s my progress so far:
Look at that, my bar is juuuuust touching the line!
It’s the part before that I want to talk about. The part of the graph where my bars were well below the line. The part where I was not doing well at all.
Yes, it’s just a few days. But they were painful days. Days where I had to force myself to sit and grind out just a little bit so that I could say I was making progress.
I didn’t like it. I wasn’t particularly enjoying writing my story (an adult thriller). Drafting is supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be discovery. Instead, it was drudgery.
And then I figured out why. Glancing back over the bits that I had forced out, there was no voice. I was writing in third person. And I was nowhere near the thoughts of my main character. I was watching her from the outside and reporting on her physical movements, on the words she spoke.
It was dull.
You see that big jump on my graph? That is the point where I switched to writing in first person. Once I climbed inside the head of my character and let her talk, let her tell the story, the words began to move. The story had voice. It had life.
It may still be first draft garbage. I won’t know that until I get to the end.
All that matters is that at this moment, I want to write the story again. I want to sit down and listen to Viv tell me her story. I want to see what she does next. I want to throw obstacles in her way and watch her find a way over or around them.
I want to write the story.
Are you playing in NaNo? If so, let me know how it’s gone for you so far!
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