You guys, I know this is my day to post something witty and learned, but I am so pooped, it is not gonna happen. In order to meet my editor’s deadline, I went way out of my comfort zone and wrote not only in the early morning but late into the night as well for over a week. I have hit the wall.

Weirdly, I think I got some of my best writing done in this not-ideal circumstance. Or maybe I’m so delirious I can’t tell anymore.

There’s something about having a gun to your head to make you stop fussing around and just. get. on. with. it. Stop agonizing over a word choice. Stop dithering over a way to get into a dialogue scene and leap into it. It was banzai, going-with-the-gut instinct writing. And it was strangely exhilarating.

Perhaps I’ll feel differently later, but I’m actually pretty proud of what I cranked out in such a short space. This is where having the fundamentals of writing internalized becomes a huge support. I don’t have to think about active verses passive sentence structure, how to build tension, how to have dialogue unfold without being littered with annoying tags. Of course I had to edit for tightness, but I was surprised at how clean my first draft looked.

Or again, maybe I’m delirious.

Have you tried banzai writing? (NaNoWriMo counts) How did it work out for you? Are there any tips you can pass along to others?

My biggest tip: put the stress in a box and go for it.
Image by ~art-ichaut.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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