NaNoBlog 2002
30 days.
50,000 words.
No sweat.
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NaNoBlog 2002 |
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Thursday, November 07, 2002
Oh. Duh! I realized I already left clues in the first 15,000 words that people have tended to misunderstand my main character and jump to unfounded conclusions about her, without ever giving any examples. I wondered why I had even put that in there. Now I know! I'll bet I can come up with some past incident in which there was some big brouhaha about her, based on unfounded assumptions or accusations, that made her withdraw from the people around her.
The subconscious mind is so fascinating. When I was little, I would sometimes try to come up with a completely random string of words that had nothing obvious to do with each other: camera, taco, submarine, lemur, peninsula, etc. My dad kept telling me it couldn't be done for any extended period, and that really irked me, so I kept trying. But I never managed to disprove him...five or six words into my list, I'd always come out with something with some sort of clear connection to one of the ones before it. My husband says that in studies, they've even given people lists of words randomly selected by a computer, asked them what the words had in common, and most of the time people could come up with some way to connect them or make sense of them together. Basically, our brains seek and generate patterns everywhere. They are always trying to make sense of things. The other night I got a flash of inspiration and suddenly knew who the new character was that I had wanted to introduce into my story. And I was amazed how that made lots of other pieces fit together in ways I hadn't consciously planned. So, I realized my brain is kind of like a big supercomputer, and I don't necessarily have to sit down and force myself to think up every possible plot twist or development in the novel...I just need to feed some pieces I want to fit together: Lydia, anti-social, guy in fedora, school, step-sister, and leave my brain to work it out and spit out the answer when its done. Except, of course, that with NaNo, I don't always have time to wait for it to work! posted by Alison | 3:00 PM
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