I\u2019m not usually a guy who engages in literary exercises. If I\u2019m writing, I want the words I produce to count toward something.<\/p>\n
Now I understand there is value in learning, and no word written in pursuit of craft is ever wasted. I get that. But I also know myself well enough to realize that I get impatient when words on the page aren\u2019t leading me toward completing a work in progress.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not a great trait, but we all work with what we\u2019ve got. (I also don\u2019t like to read books about writing, though I love to buy them and have a bookcase full, but that is a blog post for another day.)<\/p>\n
So after laying this groundwork, you\u2019ll understand why I was less than enthusiastic when October rolled around and one of our assignments was to interview a character for our upcoming NaNoWriMo novel. I admit that I had an advantage over some of the other Caf\u00e9 contributors because I\u2019d planned to use the month of November to complete a novel I was already writing. But that didn\u2019t stop me from doing a whole lot of internal bitching about the task.<\/p>\n
This went on for a while until I finally decided to just shut up and write. (This, by the way, has proven to be great advice whenever I\u2019m trying to avoid an assignment.)<\/p>\n
Once I committed myself to putting something on the page, the interview almost wrote itself. For anyone interested, it was called \u201cFailed Conversion\u201d and appeared October 8, 2012.<\/p>\n
In the piece, I took a minor character from my novel, Mike Mackey, someone who was more comic relief than anything else in the story, and created a scenario in which a radio interview gets completely out of hand. It was a fun way to explore his personality, and it also gave me a chance to bring a little adversity into his life.<\/p>\n
In the few appearances Mackey makes in my book, he\u2019s obviously a guy who moves through life with almost no conscience or consequence to his actions. I was able to change that by banging out about 1,000 words, and I got the opportunity to play. I tried to tell a few jokes, tweak people in general, and just be over the top ridiculous.<\/p>\n
I had a ball.<\/p>\n
My takeaway from all of this is that I need to try to find the humor in every assignment from here on out. Even if it\u2019s not there, I need to make it fun. Because if I\u2019m having a good time writing it, you might have a good time reading it.<\/p>\n
And, of course, the ultimate goal is for all of you to realize you adore me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m not usually a guy who engages in literary exercises. If I\u2019m writing, I want the words I produce to count toward something. Now I understand there is value in learning, and no word written in pursuit of craft is ever wasted. I get that. But I also know myself well enough to realize that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[40,167,447,527,733],"class_list":["post-7098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influence","tag-adversity","tag-character-interview","tag-fun","tag-humor","tag-nanowrimo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7098\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}