Ramblings of an aspiring writer

So, this November I engaged in the ultimate stupidity. No, it isn’t trying to write 50,000 words by the end of the month whilst decorating the house, sending out holiday cards, trying to keep the place clean and take care of two kids and an invalid dog. Nope. I can handle the words.

Stupid me also took up a new hobby. For the last week, I’ve been juggling words and knitting. And I’m not really sure which is going better, or if either is going well at all.

Yesterday, I took a writing break to work on the hat for a little bit. I’d been doing this thing when I started a new row where I wrapped the loose thread around to make the stitches tighter. Because tighter is better, right? When I looked at the project though, I realized that every time I did that, I was making a new row of stitches. It looked awful. Then it hit me. Those loose end stitches will be hidden when I have to stitch them together anyway. So I went back to leaving those loose ends.

When I put the knitting down to work on my NaNo project, I couldn’t help but see the correlation. NaNo is all about getting the words out. If you try to make your writing tight as you go, you’ll end up making all sorts of extra work for yourself, and it might even keep you from finishing. NaNo is a celebration of loose ends. Have a story thread that loses its momentum? Don’t cut it – leave it alone. Have a scene that is all dialogue and no action. It’s okay. Forget about a character for fifty pages? That’s cool.

NaNo isn’t about fixing those things. One thing I’ve learned is that if you cut those loose ends as you go, you’ll forget about them, and sometimes loose ends can lead to wonderful things.

Last year’s NaNo novel (the first in a planned series) had a throw-away character named Kris. During revisions I debated cutting him because he wasn’t really necessary. As my finger hovered in the air over the delete key, I saw deeper meanings in his character and ways to work him into later stories. Rather than cutting his part, I built it up. Had I edited Kris from “Pretty Souls” during NaNo, I’d have forgotten about him and missed the opportunity.

After I finished my afternoon writing, I picked up my knitting again. As I kept going, I saw that the loose stitches might not be the prettiest things in the world, but they looked much better than what I’d thought was tighter, better than what I’d believed I’d done “right”. I hope the same is true of my novel. I hope that in the end, I can take all those dangly pieces of story and put them together into something whole and maybe even beautiful. For now though, I’m just embracing the spirit of NaNo and celebrating every word and loose end.