"Seasoned Writers Never Give Up."

Joyce Carol Oates is one of my top five favorite novelists. Here she is talking about characters being the starting place for most novelists and definitely for her. She also considers setting as the equivalent of a character. 

 I was startled to hear her say that the first six weeks of work on every new novel is pure hell for her. "Seasoned writers never give up." she adds. 

 This is heartening as I sit here one full week into NaNo with only that first 555 words. 

 One of her writing exercises as she begins writing a new story is to write dialog between two characters for several hours until there is a breakthrough and she feels a connection with the character, knows their voice and then lets them lead her into the story. 

 That reminds me of the exercises I did a couple of NaNos back in which I set up a rant sheet for each character and let them monologue at will until they ran out of steam. I think maybe I'll try that again. Maybe in conjunction with another suggestion I picked up on one of the blogs (sorry I've forgotten whose) and that is to have your characters keep a journal.  Liquid Story Binder actually provides a file format for the purpose and/or for keeping a writer's journal for the project.  But I'm not using LSB for NaNo as I'm still learning my way around it.

I will count the words in any of those three exercises. Of course.

But that's going to have to wait until I've slept a few hours.