Total Word Count: 37,546 Today's Word Count: 2,416
Hoarding and Flow
I used to have a serious hoarding habit; I hoarded bits of writing and snippets in notebooks because I thought that one day it might all fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and make one 'proper' story. Even if it didn't, I would have all of this stuff to fall back on when the muse, who made infrequent visits, stopped calling altogether
Consequently, I have quite a lot of
Works In Progress....
I realised that not everything I wrote would be ‘usable’ but it was all ‘useful’.
Some of it is a warm up, the scales and arpeggios or the stretches, and like a musician or dancer, if you practice your art daily, you develop fluency and that becomes FLOW.
Once I got into the FLOW of DAILY writing, I learned the one key lesson which enabled me to finish a novel
I know that the writing muse does not ration the words; I ration my own words through lack of flow.
As soon as I learned the skill of just writing, turning off the internal editor, writing what I feel..... then a new habit formed and a bit like charging a car battery, the more I write the more the words flow.
Some days it has been a struggle to add words to the 37,500+ in 19 days; but I have to write every day, (even though I have not added words to the NaNo novel everyday). On those days I write longhand, sketches, ideas, connections, things I have noticed; but I write something every day.
Sometimes the flow turns to a trickle and some days the words are not necessarily the right ones, but they are flowing today and I am glad I learned how to turn on the taps...
