Xandra Gregory

It snowed last week.  A wonderful, white blizzard of unique and precious snowflakes and a delicious kind of cold that only comes with snow.  And I didn’t write, because I have small children who like snowballs.   But I did think a lot about accumulation, especially as I was pushing it off the front porch.

There’s nothing a writer likes better than accumulating words.  I just came down not too long ago from a period of 30 days where I had to produce 1667 words a day (or sweat catching up).  And lemme tellya, days where I pulled ahead, or got my words in early, those were good days. Thing is, though, when you’ve been doing this for longer than a week, you’ll start to notice something.  Everybody has writing goals and tasks that sound like the easiest thing in the world–”Write two pages” or “Write a thousand words.” And they inevitably finish with, “…and then I’ll have a novel!”  If I just let the snow fall–it doesn’t take work, it just takes gravity.

Haha.  I mock because I am jealous.  Because no, in ten weeks, I will not have a novel (and chances are, most of the rest of you won’t, either).   If I just let the snow fall…I still won’t have a snowman.  Oh, yes, at the end of ten weeks, I’ll have enough words to fill the pages between the front and back covers of a novel, but it will be a long ways away from being a novel.  And that blanket of snow on the ground is only a snowman in its unrealized, unrolled, unpacked, and un-balled form.

Accumulating pages and words is a great exercise for getting your brain into the practice of expressing what you want to say, but there’s a world’s more work in doing it. As anyone who’s participated in NaNo can tell you, it does give you a rush to realize you’ve created.

But I’m staring out my window at a white world and thinking that accumulation of words and pages is a lot like the accumulation of snow.  It’s beautiful when it’s happening, and there’s a myriad of good things that will come of it…but sooner or later, you have to go get the shovel and put it where it belongs.

Tags: snow, Writing Process

This entry was posted by Xandra on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 8:46 am and is filed under An Author's Life, Deep Thoughts, Writing, Writing Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.