For the love of God, Montresor!

So i was happy about my writing last night, because of quantity, sure, but also because I wrote something where I got really sad for my hero because I am cruel to her. There's a difference between me being sad for my character, and a reader doing the same thing, but that's the best guideline I have so far. One of the tricky things about writing/storytelling is that you've got to know what to leave out. I have a tendency to want to tell every moment in the life of a character, when that's certainly not necessary, and, in fact, detracts from the main story. My tip today that I learned from last year's contest is that if you get to a point where you've gone down the wrong path and need to back the truck up, that's called editing and editing is off limits during nanowrimo. However, you're going to say that your novel would grind to a halt if you weren't able to back up. The compromise is to italicize the part you want to eliminate so that it still is included in your word count, which it should because you had to write it in order to know that it wasn't what you needed, and to erase it completely would be editing.