Who needs standards?

I was talking with my friend Marshall today at school, and somehow we got on the topic of writing. I'm of the opinion that there's two kinds of writers - the Writer and the Author.

The Author is a bit full of himself, a bit uptight, a bit of a snob. The Author sits in quaint little coffee shops and writes while looking down his nose at people. The Author writes about things like moral ambiguity and the perils of mankind. Nobody likes Authors.

Writers, on the other hand, are a certifiably insane class. These are the kind of people who spend every November frantically typing thousands of words a day, who write their best at four o'clock in the morning, who find inspiration in things like towels and kitchen appliances. They write about things like hovercraft car chases and Pop-Tart heists.

Authors are way too serious and dull. They are the sort of people who can make a book about vampires dreadfully boring. Not so with me.

This year for NaNoWriMo I have decided to approach it from the Writer angle rather than the Author route (which I have taken an unfortunate number of times in the past). It's going to be set in modern times, and it's going to start out with a guy who decides he wants to be a pirate. I honestly don't care where it goes from there. It's Nanowrimo. It's supposed to be ridiculous.

Realism is what editing is for. If you spend all your time during the drafting process worrying about minor details, you lose the spirit of the project. That's how you end up creating these weird, dead, limp sort of stories that just kind of flop over and don't do anything. The best things I've written were created when I was in one of those screw-the-plot-outline moods and just wrote random stuff. Reign it in later. For now, just do it for fun.

Not that the philosophy comes to me with difficulty. Yes, I have written both a hovercraft car-chase and a Pop-Tart heist in the past.

I can't wait for November!