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The Prism
A place for me to record day-to-day thoughts and occurances.
Writing a novel is a whole lot like carving a statue. You can't do it haphazardly, but you have to start somewhere.

as some of you know, I participated in my first NaNoWriMo this last year. I can honestly say that it's been one of the best experiences of my life. The result of that massive writing binge was a half-baked fragment of a story full of grammatical errors, plot holes, and contradictions of character. Half the time I wasn't sure what I was doing, the the times that I did know what I was doing were the times when the words had to be dragged out of me by sheer willpower.

In the end, though, I did it. I wrote over 50,000 words in thirty days. I tell you, it was a rush. I thought that it was the coolest thing ever.

Then I read what I'd written.

There was a short period of embarrassment that followed, but I got over it. As I said at the beginning of this post, writing a novel is like carving a statue. After a couple weeks, I came to the realization that I hadn't really carved a statue during the month of November. Rather, I'd carved out a chunk of marble from the quarry to work from. Sure, it wasn't all that pretty, and there were entire chunks of other kinds of rock that just weren't going to fit into the final product, but it was a starting point.

So now I'm taking that piece of marble, and chipping away the parts that don't fit. In time, perhaps I'll have my Venus de Milo, or my Thinker, but for the moment I still have work to do.

The statue exists in the mind of the maker, but what good does it do if it's never begun? NaNoWriMo gave me the block of stone. Now all I have to do is shape it.





 
 

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