Well, I’m headed in the right direction; I am still catching up.

I went back at one point today and plugged a new scene (to use the language of drama and cinema) into an earlier chapter. There’s no rule in NaNoWriMo against rewriting, but the common understanding is that NaNoWriMo is about not second-guessing yourself, and the sheer volume of what you’ve got to write means that you don’t have time to go back and rewrite major portions of the story.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t ever scroll up or that your words are carved in stone once you save them to disk. If you mentioned in passing that one character’s husband is a middle manager, and then later you realize that you have great story potential by making him a trapeze artist, there’s nothing wrong with going back and taking out the earlier sentence about his occupation. If you think of a scene you should have included in an earlier chapter, and you can drop it in without rewriting the passages on either side of it, why wouldn’t you do so?

I did a little bit of that tonight, tweaking a couple of passages and dropping some additional material into chapter two which I realized needed to be there. (At that point, I was already into chapter three, which I finished up just now.)

I’m still having fun with it, and I feel good about moving it forward as November marches on.