Familiar (Five Minute Friday)

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By now, you are familiar with the fact that on Fridays, or soon thereafter, I participate in this thing called FiveMinuteFriday.com. Each week, Kate Motaung provides a one-word prompt to write about for 5 little minutes. Sometimes they just flow out of me without much thought. Other times, like tonight, nothing comes to mind and I just don’t know what to write. As a writer, this happens sometimes. Some would call it writer’s block. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block. In my case, when I can’t think what to write, it is really a case of idea block. Once I get an idea, I can write about it. Sometimes I can’t find much to write, but other times one little spark ignites an entire bonfire of other ideas and I am off and writing.

Writing my novel this month as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge is getting tougher because I am running out of the scenes I had planned to write. I have been adding scenes in along the way as I think of them or find a hole in the plot that needs to be filled. I don’t want to just write stuff for the sake of word count, so no, I will not be adding a dragon to my novel or an unexplained dead body just to boost the word count only to have to cut it all later when future me gets around to editing this novel. I am familiar with the difficulties of editing and future has begged current and past me never to do that to her.

I was on par one day this month, the 12th, I think. I am familiar with the perils of falling behind in my word count, of starting late or slowly, of getting to the 25,000 words stage and questioning everything I have written so far and thinking there is no point in continuing as it is all terrible and no one will ever want to read it. Despite all of these typical doubts and fears, there are only six days left in the month and I still need to write about 11,000 words. I am trying to keep in mind this year that my story needs to be finished which means it needs a beginning, middle, and end. My characters need to grow and change over the course of the novel. I need to get back to writing the novel, but instead, here I am writing this blog post. Really any excuse will do. I don’t feel too bad because I did write 3,000 words today in my novel and these words don’t count toward my monthly NaNo goal. I am familiar with this thing I am doing right now. It is called PROCRASTINATION. Sometimes it comes in the way of writing blog posts like tonight, or doing laundry and loading the dishwasher like yesterday. I know all about it because it used to happen back in college when there was homework to be done. Hubby would catch me cleaning the house and he knew, he was familiar with my tactics. He would ask me what school work I was avoiding by doing housework. Pretty smart that man of mine. Ok, enough of this procrastinating, let’s end this post so I can get back to the novel I should be writing. Stay tuned next week when November ends and see how I did.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Familiar
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

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