NaNoWriMo keeps getting closer, and I still haven't decided on a story. I know it's going to be slow going if I just start writing off the top of my head without planning scenes ahead of time, so I'd better decide which story I'm going to go with over this weekend. It's not that I have to have all my scenes planned out, but I need enough to at least get me through the current day's writing, so that I can take a breather and plan further scenes after it. I think my issue is that I haven't particularly latched on to any of the characters I've been thinking of for my stories yet, so there isn't a particular story that jumps out at me. Every so often I'll be seized by the notion to jump off and write something completely different---a prospect both dangerous and exciting. I'm less worried about getting to 50,000 words this year than I ever have been before, but I have to be careful not to get cocky and just take it for granted that I'll finish on time. I think in my fourth year I ended up going about ten thousand words over (and was still only about two-thirds of the way through the story, which I STILL haven't finished), but all the other years it came pretty close to the wire, and the story started to run out just as the 50,000 word mark became tantalizingly close.
Let me go over again what I've got so far: there's my coming of age story of a New York kid transplanted to Iowa, my fictional dystopian city anthology, my one about the struggles about an oddball Staten Island family, and (running a distant fourth) the tale of the world's last moviegoer, whose largesse supports the entire remaining industry. They're all premises that I feel I could write at least a few chapters of at this point, but I don't know whether they'll peter out after that or inspire me to keep going. I guess I could always start with one and switch to another if the situation becomes truly dire, but finding the momentum to start up an entirely different plot after the first one fails can be difficult given how fraught with discouragement that predicament is.
At the very least I'll have the opportunity to write with my friends again, and I'm looking forward to that in and of itself. There's so much more creative energy in a room full of other writers than there is when I'm just alone with the blank page. Granted the blank page doesn't terrify me like it used to, but other people's determination working towards the same goal is like a drug that there's just no substitute for. Even after five years of NaNoWriMo I hardly ever write new work outside of November. If I can find the time for my marathon training I'm sure I could find the time for writing, but then there's that question of momentum again...
At least I've been doing my daily writing pretty consistently (even if I only rarely work up the nerve to post it to the public). I can write 750 words in 20 minutes pretty consistently now, which is something I never thought I'd be able to do before. I'm sure it'd take me considerably longer if I was writing this all down longhand. My penmanship was never the greatest, and I fear it's gone downhill significantly since the days I used to regularly practice it while taking notes in college. I think I still have those notebooks somewhere in my parents' house, but lord knows what I'd ever do with them... I just hope that I can keep this kind of speed (or anything resembling it) when I switch over from fact to fiction next week.
