NaNoWriMo - Day 18 - Over, Under and Around

So turns out I was wrong. I didn't work on chapter 2 yesterday, since at some point I decided I would have to do some more research and take some more notes before I understand exactly what I want it to include and/or achieve. I did, however, make a lot of progress on chapter 3. The point, I guess, is that I have to choose my battles, and while writing will probably always be a struggle (for me, at least), sometimes when I find myself constantly avoiding a certain chapter or scene I have to recognize that it's because I'm not ready to write them just yet (this is not always easy to tell apart from my natural tendency towards procrastination).

John Gardner writing

This sort of thing has happened before, with my first novel, and often delayed me for weeks or months, due to the linear and cumulative structure of that work, which did not allow me to skip ahead and work on a different part. The novel I'm currently working on is a bit looser and "jazzier" (a term borrowed from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction) so I am able to move about the various sections a little more freely.

P.S. If I wasn't doing NaNoWriMo this month I probably would have written something about Ben Greenman's article in The Daily Beast: Hey, That's My Line, and perhaps somehow applied it to my writing. Maybe I'll get to it in December.