going to camp!

I'm all signed up for the August trip to Camp NaNoWriMo. Na(tional) No(vel) Wri(ting) Mo(nth) usually occurs in November, but there's also a camp-themed reprise in June and August. Here's the scoop: between midnight on August 1 and August 31, I (and a buncha other people) will write 50,000 words.

I mentioned this to a friend, and she said, "It seems if you are writing thoughtfully and with literary merit, about 500 words per day is the most one could manage." I said, yes, it is. I will not be writing with literary merit. The goal is to write an average of 1,667 words per day. This is crank-it-out-city.

The whole point of this exercise is to blow past that nasty little editor whispering in our ear, "Eeep! I can't believe you would write that! That's just awful! Who would be interested in that muck? Why don't you clean it up just a little before going on?"

And before you know it, you have novelis paralysis. Or even novelis rigor mortis.

I attempted NaNoWriMo several years ago. I had a bare wisp of an idea that truthfully didn't overly excite me, and around about day 8, I was seriously in the weeds. Not only was I so terribly behind in word count I would have to write around the clock for a week to catch up, my idea choked. If I'd known my characters better, I might have been able to listen to where they wanted to go. If I'd really understood that being in the weeds is a completely normal place to be on day 8 or almost any other,  it might not have been fatal.

As I've started writing again in the last few months, part of my practice has been to read a lot of good writers on writing, and they all agree on one thing: bad is the pathway to good. You have to produce something, even something truly heinous, before you can produce anything really good. So for the month of August--and the days leading up to my departure for camp--I'm embracing "in the weeds." I'm going to own that patch before we're done.