Word Vomit

So it's been a while since I've composed a blog post on a topic pertaining to writing, and as this was originally intended to be a writing-focused blog, I figured I should remedy this. So I am here to discuss with you a topic that is currently very near and dear to my heart:

Word Vomit.

I swear, this has more to do with writing than my stomach flu a month ago.

One of the biggest points of NaNoWriMo (the challenge that I take part in every November because it appears that I just so enjoy the sensation of failure in epic proportions) is to get people to actually step out and write something that they want to write instead of waiting for some magical moment of inspiration that may never come. If you have a story in your head, sometimes you just gotta take a leap of faith and write the darn thing! Critics say that NaNoWriMo is a negative influence on writers, encouraging lousy planning and poor writing, putting the focus on quantity rather than quality and taking blows at the respect for our art.

And it's true, sometimes my NaNo work is all for the word count, a lot of it becomes more free-flow writing than plot and character development, and just pushing the cursor forward becomes what my sister-in-law and I dubbed in November 2011 as "Word Vomit."

But now that I have shamelessly declared my half of a NaNo Novel as "Rubbish" and banished it to the deepest recesses of my hard drive to be read when I want a good laugh, I have turned to my Paper and Ink Child and, with great anticipation, am closing in on the completion of a First Draft.

And here and there, I am encountering "Word Vomit."

When a series of life circumstances thrust me into the dark abyss of Writer's Block at the end of 2010, I pulled out of it by committing to write at least 500 words a day of something besides journaling. Some of these chunks are actually still in my Paper and Ink Child. They got the story moving again, and without them, this poor baby of mine would surely have died, and the coroner would have written the cause of death: "Failure to Thrive."

I have a prewrite for my novel (a list of scenes that probably makes little sense to anyone besides me) that I've been holding to, and most recently I have found that my instances of "word vomit" occur when I've left my novel to occupy itself for several days to a couple of weeks. I miss it, start dreaming of scenes to come, and finally spew something into the word document that mostly still resembles the prewrite just so I can get to the part that I really want to write.

Through the process, I have come to decide that Word Vomit isn't an all-together negative thing. It gets a novel moving, it creates progress in a first draft. And by the end of the first draft, I'll have a better idea of how the book is supposed to flow, I'll know some of the specifics that I'm missing right now. And then I'll be free to revise the ever-living daylights out of it. When that time comes, I shall be happy to scrub every trace of vomit from the document and fill it with flowery air fresheners to chase away the stench.

Until then, you must excuse me. I need to go chase my cursor into the battle scene that I really want to write right now!