IWSG – July CampNaNo

So I’m doing the July session of CampNaNo again, and I’m already starting to doubt myself.

Not doubting that I can meet the NaNo goals, of course.  (Since you can change those in CampNaNo, it would be really crazy if I couldn’t.  I’ll probably meet my current goals before the week is out.  I might up my word count, just to look less ridiculous.  Dunno.)

What I’m doubting is just how I fit into the grand scheme of being a “writer.”

There’s all these CampNaNo support messages with tips and tricks for developing characters and plot and stuff.

My plots are usually haphazard and random.  (Last July’s CampNaNo was one of the only times I’ve ever tried to align a character’s arc to the standard definition of a character arc, and it ended up being a ludicrous 155k words long, in part because I kept adding unnecessary material in order to put the character through extra tribulations in order to provide him a tiny modicum of growth.)  My current characters are…well, okay, no, they’re not actually borrowed, because this is OC-based fanfic, but normally my characters are either borrowed or more intuited than planned; I tend to just have this gut feeling of “this is how this person is” without stopping to define anything.  (Sometimes it works, and sometimes it really doesn’t.)

Other people in the cabin are talking about the character and world-building exercises they use, and I feel like such a poser, because I just dash out whatever gobbledygook I feel like.

I mean, it’s not as though I never do anything to put a little effort into it.  I do research when I can/when it’s needed, but…that seems like it’s about as far as I can reliably go.  Even the amount of planning and sketching out the story in advance that I do changes from work to work.

I don’t know.  Maybe I’m just rambling pointlessly (both in my fiction and here).

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