Saving the Best for Last or Procrastination?
This month, my NaNoWriMo project is Delectable book #3, tentatively titled CRUSH. (NaNo is a month-long writing project during November with a goal of a 50,000-word novel at the end.) [CRUSH is the story of a winemaker trying to keep his family business safe from the big wine conglomerates taking over other Napa and Sonoma Valley small wineries and the man who risks his own dreams in order to help him..]
I had a slow start and some days I didn’t hit my target word count, but I crossed the 50k mark in the evening of November 24. Fantastic, right? It would be, but my project isn’t finished. I still have quite a few scenes left to write for CRUSH, and unlike my usual writing pattern, the scenes left to write are among the biggest scenes in the book, not the little crumbs and transitions between the meaty bits.
Like the typical procrastinator, I tend to put off things I don’t like to do until the last possible moment. But these are the best scenes, the sexy wine-tasting scene I envisioned when I first came up with the basic plot for this book. Still unwritten. Holly Lisle, an author and writing coach calls the fun scenes “candy bar scenes” because people love to read them as much as you enjoy writing them. They are the tastiest parts of the book, and often the key scenes that punctuate the story with why everyone wants what they want and how they try to get it. And for a writer, they’re usually low-hanging fruit. You know what happens, and you don’t need to wait to fill in some blanks before you can write these.
But I’ve been putting them off. This time around I’m feeling that these scenes are too big, too important and to be honest, they are scaring the hell out of me. I’m afraid I can’t get what I see in my brain, onto the paper. That even if I do, it won’t be as amazing as I’m imagining it. I’m afraid of the candy bars (okay, I’m trying to lose weight, but this really isn’t a metaphor for my entire life). So I keep writing around them and up to the edges and going back and prettying up a lot of scenes which are just fine.
It’s time to tackle the big stuff, the fun stuff. And maybe, since we’re really close to being finished, I’ll have not only the excitement of the scenes themselves, but that additional motivation from knowing they are the only thing between me and typing “The End.”
And of course, if they totally suck, there’s that old adage, you can always rewrite it…
So, here goes nothing!
2 Responses to “Saving the Best for Last or Procrastination?”
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“I’m afraid I can’t get what I see in my brain, onto the paper.”
That’s me with my current VIP. I hate it! I know what I’m going to write, but I’m finding it very hard to sit down and write it.
I’ve been lucky I have a tight deadline for this and the push of NaNo. But I still don’t feel every scene is quite my idea of how it should be. But then, that’s what editing is for, right? As they say, you can’t edit a blank page. So once it’s down it should hopefully be easier to see what’s missing and make sure to add it! Good luck with your Wip, Erica!