Nanowrimo, Day Fourteen – Squishy Brains
Posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011Today’s topic is stolen whole-heartedly from Epic Robot Danni’s blog and something that Lani Diane Rich said in her Storywonk Podcast. Today’s topic is about Squishy Brains.
Squishy Brains (or Mushy Brains as Lani originally described them) are what happens when normally intelligent people do Nanowrimo. The first ten days, no matter how well or how badly it’s going, people will be up excited and will not be able to wait to get to their computers. However, after 10 days of living in a caffeine/sugar driven world, working the equivalent of a second job, you start getting pretty tired. The tired mounts up, the sleep isn’t quite as awesome as it could be since you’re thinking about your novel 24/7 and the coke/coffee/sugar isn’t doing its job anymore.
That’s when it hits, usually around the middle of week two. You wake up one morning and realize that you have Squishy Brains (also known as the Dumbs). Squishy brain allows you to write and think about your novel all day, but the intense focus in this one area starts causing you to make mistakes everywhere. Things that are normally easy take an extra minute or two to figure out, things that normally come easy are suddenly hard, and people that you normally think of as a near relations of cave men will suddenly be able to out-think you on questions and problems that you’re having.
None of this tends to give writers much confidence in themselves and certainly not in their ability to write. The interesting part of this is that this is conversely the time when I find that I do some of my best writing. I’ve been thinking about the book for so long that by the time I touch fingers to keyboard the words just flow and all of the problems have been solved in advance. The spelling may not be as good as it normally is, but the ease with which the story falls onto the page is incredible.
What I’ve always found the most confusing is that this is the point at which most Nano’s give up. They decide that life while trying to do Nanowrimo is too hard, their novels must suck (look at how much their everyday life is sucking, after all) and they would really like to catch up on their tv shows that they’ve been missing.
So today’s instruction is to find glory and release in the Squishy Brains. They will make you happy, they will improve your writing and they will make you ready to take on the world. However, they will not make it easier to make complex decisions (that don’t concern your novel) or to help you in the finishing of menial tasks. This is the place the inner editor hates the most. It’s the area when he knows he’s needed the least and so he’ll fight you hand and foot to get you back to where he considers you on track.
Don’t let him. Kick him down. When he comes for you, laugh in his face and say the words…Squishy Brains… with glee!
Tags: Epic Robot Danni, motivation, Nanowrimo, Squishy Brains, Story Wonk, storywonk
Posted in Blogs by B.A. Matthews | Comments Off