For too long I've tried to write like my favorite writers. Wendell Berry in the woods with pencil and paper. Hemingway in the early morning hours and with a typewriter. I've always written my first draft in pen and paper, and maybe that's why there have never been any second drafts. It is an astoundingly tedious process to read my handwriting while transcribing the words to a digital copy. I started a story about a patient and their family from the ICU in pen, then typed what I had written and then printed it without saving. Now I am retyping the story and saving it. The idea being I would get three shots at the first draft by necessity. Revision built in.
I thought that might be my process for a while. But goddamn was that hard.
So, I jumped on the National Novel Writing Month bandwagon. And I have really enjoyed the process. Typing the first draft is much easier and much less time consuming, though decidedly not as cool. And the attractive website to update word counts is an encouragement. And a solid, but doable goal of 1600 words a day to work towards makes me feel like I've accomplished something every day.
Here I am at seven days of writing. Every day I have put at least 1600 words, from my head, into the world. I'm not enthralled with the output (yet), but the process has been good. And I think that's the goal of NaNoWriMo (god I hate that); to just write. It's demonstrated to me that I do in fact have the chops to sit and just write.
And that's a good feeling.
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