Writing on Writing
I am doing NaNoWriMo again this year, and I was thinking about my story this morning, specifically a certain character. This character started out as a naive parish priest and has become a sexually repressed gay parish priest who is using the main character to further his own ends. In thinking about this character the idea of him being a pedophile surfaced and I immediately rejected the idea, not wanting to either further the stereotype of gay men as pedophiles or priests as pedophiles. Then I noticed the act of rejecting and felt, as noble as the sentiment may have been, it was another manifestation of my inner critic that was keeping me from writing.

My motto for this NaNo, then, is the anti-Nancy "Don't say no," let whatever the story might be pour out. The first draft, and especially the first draft in November, is not the time for refinement or compassion for my characters or the social implications thereof. It is not, to bastardize Michaelangelo, time to chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. It's time to chip away everything that doesn't look like a block of stone. That is to say, now is not the time for sculpting my novel, now is the time for carving what will eventually become my novel out of the solid rock of the mountain. I don't need to write something that looks like a novel, I need to write something that looks like it could become my novel.

And I thought about this thought, and I thought, "This is good."

A.