Half Full or Half Empty?

NaNoWriMo is half over, and I’m half way to 50,000 words. So far, so good.

The process has been interesting so far. Because of the pace of the writing, you can’t take time to worry about the quality of the prose. It’s all about quantity, baby, quantity! But I have found that as I am typing along at break-neck pace, all of a sudden something wonderful shows up on the screen. I’ll stop for a moment to read it and think, “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

It reminds of something that Anne Lamott says in “Bird by Bird”. The following excerpt is from the chapter titled, “Shitty First Drafts”:

There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is beautiful or wild that you know you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.