When the Words Don't Flow

I decided to try the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. At the time, 50,000 words didn't sound like it would be that hard. It might take 3 of those to actually make one of my rough draft novels, and I had a whole month. But I hadn't participated before, so I didn't make any grand announcement of it. I'd just be another author trying to fulfill a personal challenge. I did tell my husband, so he (maybe) wouldn't be too upset when I didn't spend my evenings and weekends doing housework. (It isn't that I normally do a LOT of housework, but just in case I got caught up in writing, and didn't get to any of it...)

I've had bad writing days when the words didn't flow, and I've had good writing days when my fingers could hardly trip over the keys fast enough. But so far this November, for this challenge, I have had mostly dismal writing days. Two days, I got no words written at all. One day I wrote a bit more than 300 words, another almost 700 words, and a third, around 1000 words. Today – a weekend day when I went for groceries this morning, and was home alone this afternoon, so hopefully I could focus – I have ... so far ... written 900 words.

Why are the words not flowing? As I told my hub when he asked that question, I'm in the middle of a highly emotional scene for my heroine, and since I always seem to identify pretty closely to one of my characters, that makes it emotional and difficult for me as well.

Hubby suggested I set that scene aside for now and move on to a later one. I've known some authors do that, but I'm not one of them. Even with an outline, my story tends to wander off on tangents when I'm not looking, and if I went on to write a later scene that started at Point B, when I came back and finished what comes between, I'd probably wind up someplace north of Point B. Then I'd have to spend time constructing a bridge between where I wound up and where I needed to be...

Nope, not worth it. I'll just slug it out with the emotional turmoil while I'm here, and hope the words really start flowing once I get past this bit.