I’m not usually a guy who engages in literary exercises. If I’m writing, I want the words I produce to count toward something.
Now I understand there is value in learning, and no word written in pursuit of craft is ever wasted. I get that. But I also know myself well enough to realize that I get impatient when words on the page aren’t leading me toward completing a work in progress.
It’s not a great trait, but we all work with what we’ve got. (I also don’t like to read books about writing, though I love to buy them and have a bookcase full, but that is a blog post for another day.)
So after laying this groundwork, you’ll understand why I was less than enthusiastic when October rolled around and one of our assignments was to interview a character for our upcoming NaNoWriMo novel. I admit that I had an advantage over some of the other Café contributors because I’d planned to use the month of November to complete a novel I was already writing. But that didn’t stop me from doing a whole lot of internal bitching about the task.