(Or not!! Let's be serious.)
I'm getting terribly distracted by this other story I've been cooking up. In Hollywood there's this nasty idea of the 'treatment' - a rich description of the action of a story, including character descriptions and sometimes sample dialogue, somewhere between an outline and a script. To get to the treatment it helps to have an outline, and to get to a script you'd goddamn well better have something - when structural demands are as severe as they are on TV and in Hollywood film, you can't afford to just wing it and go where whimsy carries you. Not like the great American novel!!
The trouble is at least in part this: there's this story I'm really interested in telling, but not in the form that I'm forcing myself to take up next month. Yet if this project isn't uppermost in my mind, I'll never touch it, you know? The whole point of NaNoWriMo for me is to build discipline and form writerly habits - but if the slog to 50K is as bad as I'm predicting it's going to be, won't the negative feedback far outweigh the habit-building? 'I don't want writing to become just a job' - well that's silly, but I definitely don't want it to become this thing that I associate with suffering. They say if you're destined to be a writer, insofar as destiny means anything blah blah blah, if you're destined or whatever then you can't not write. People always talk about this desperate need to form words and the like. Maybe I'm too social to feel that desperation. I'm looking forward to NaNoWriMo but not because it'll help finally release something that's wanted to emerge from me; I want a work assignment in the form of a pile of bad prose. I'm going about it 'all wrong'. Still there are no expectations here but my own, and I don't want to Be A Writer, I just want to Write, right? Or so I console myself.
Halloween has in common with graduation (as I remember it) that the very next day, I'll have to start letting go of the expecations that have until now stood in for achievement in my mind/shenanigans/résumé. 'Heretofore,' he corrected himself. 'That/which have heretofore stood for &c.'
