Breakthrough

I've written before about NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month -- a "contest" where you commit to writing 50,000 words in the month of November, "winning" the bragging rights and a cool certificate at the end. I love NaNo; the intensity, the goal, the community of other crazy writers all striving to spend as many hours in front of a glowing screen as possible. I've taken part in three NaNos, writing a young adult novel (four teenagers, a car crash, and the aftermath); a henlit novel (a group of women who find themselves connected via motherhood and the suburbs); and a mystery novel (a vile woman is killed and there's no end of suspects -- but a yard duty mom figures out the real killer). The finished manuscripts are of course not truly finished -- they need editing and fleshing out, revising and tightening -- but you have a hefty stack of pages to work with, and the exercise of writing quickly seems to produce some great work.

My last attempt was the mystery, and while I've been toying with working on it some more, the exact voice has eluded me... I know what happens, and why, but I can't tell the story properly. The characters speak to me in the shower, and during driving time, and when I'm taking walks... but when I get in front of the computer they shut up and refuse to cooperate.

I hesitate to call this "writer's block," because I can write other things just fine... my PNN posts, my humor column, etc. It's just this (or any other) work of fiction that eludes me.

I was talking about this one day to my best friend, and to her credit she GOT IT. She didn't spout off about "just get writing," or some other well-meaning advice... she understood that no matter how much I worked on it, it WOULDN'T WORK until the muse had reappeared. The hours spent would be largely wasted. I'm sure some writers push through by just writing, but in my experience the best stuff needs to be spontaneous. I consider myself a scribe, a midwife to the words, rather than an inventor...

The morning after I turned in paperwork to possibly take on a job that would effectively take all my "free" time (instead of an hour and a half or so with the yard duty job, it would be six hours each day) -- of course the characters began hollering away: "Write!"

I suddenly knew what my main character's mom was like, and her in-laws, too. The mother-in-law's dog was a surprise -- he just suddenly appeared, his apricot hair and shivering disagreeableness perfectly captured. (Who knew? LOL) I had a great reason for my amateur sleuth to take on the mystery, and a solid grasp of how she thinks, talks, and conducts herself. I was rolling, people, rolling!! The entire first chapter flew out of my fingers, appearing on the screen with alarming speed. Months of nothing were erased in a single morning!

I'm eager to get back to my little town of characters and find out what happens today... because I'm by-gosh gonna sit down and let the muse have her say whenever she wants to talk, let me tell ya!