Not doin' it - #MFRWAuthor

MFRW Author 52-week blog challenge

I'm back from the Imadjinn Book Fair & Expo and getting caught up on sleep, so that means I'm more or less back on track with my blog commitments, including this one. We'll see how long that lasts. Anyway, this week's prompt is on NANOWRIMO, the weird challenge to write an entire novel within the month of November.

Um ... no.

I'm not doing it. I've never done that. I won't ever do that.

My reasons for not doing so have nothing to do with whether the challenge is stressful or too challenging. It's simply that I don't work that way. I know my creative process (which isn't really a process) and I know how I best work. Forcing myself to write results in the generation of garbage content.

For a plotter, this type of challenge might work. I can see how it would work. After all, you've got the outline and character descriptions ready to guide your path. For a diehard pantser like me, that doesn't work.

Speaking of pantsers, at the Imadjinn Book Fair & Expo, a young woman wandered among the authors asking if they were plotters or pantsers. "I'm a pantser, why?" I replied. She said the event organizers needed to fill a slot in the program and thought a panel discussion of pantsing and plotting would interest attendees. Then she asked me to serve on the panel as the token pantser. I agreed.

She wandered by several minutes later to ask about great opening lines in novels. Apparently, the organizers were setting up another panel on that topic. I replied that I thought the first line of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice the best one: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." It sets the tone for an entire genre.

She opined that the use of an adverb was a hideous flaw in Auten's iconic sentence, then informed me that the session on pantsers and plotters had been canceled. Nice to be in the loop. Among the authors in the room, only three were pantsers, so the discussion probably wouldn't have gotten much of an audience.

Ah, well, easy come, easy go.

Anyway, I think she's wrong about the adverb in that opening line.