WINNER!!!!

Yes, all those days pounding away on my NaNoWriMo project have finally paid off. It's quite a satisfying feeling to see the word "winner" in reference to something you've spent so much time working on. At dinner tonight when I yelled the word winner at the top of my lungs and then continued to congratulate myself on my recent NaNo accomplishment, my daughter looked at me smugly and declared that I was not indeed a winner if I hadn't at least received a ribbon. But let me tell you folks, those 50,000 words are treasure enough. By the end of tomorrow I hope to be typing the words THE END. Then we'll really get the party started. 

We'll see if I give myself a little break before I jump into revisions. The satisfaction I get from completing a project will probably be enough to keep pushing myself forward. After all, with each subsequent revision my sweet little WIP gets that much closer to the bigger dream.

Are You a Right Brained Writer?

I just finished reading the book THE PLOT WHISPERER in preparation for NaNoWriMo and one of my favorite parts of reading it was my realization that I'm a different sort of writer than I intuitively believed myself to be.

If you asked me whether I was a right or a left brained writer I would tell you without doubt that I'm right brained. After all, I'm such a visual person. I'm an artist who follows her feelings, right? But after reading THE PLOT WHISPERER, I realized that this might not be the case after all. As the author explains, right brained writers focus mostly on character driven plots while left brained writers focus on detailed, action driven plots. 

I've always known that I'm a list maker, a plotter, a planner, but I didn't realize exactly how much this influences my writing. And by far my biggest epiphany regarding this was realizing that the place I normally fall short in my novels is in creating completely believable and sympathetic characters. Sure, my plot moves forward at a rapid pace, but I've been overlooking the fact that I don't truly understand my characters inside and out.

So with this in mind, I'm really going to go forward with my NaNo WIP understanding what my strengths are as well as my weaknesses. I'm going to focus on what drives my characters emotionally. Hopefully by the time the month is through, I'll have a richer, more successful draft because of it.

What sort of writer are you?