First, before we get into the Smack down topic of the week: CONGRATULATIONS APRIL! She has rocked out Nanowrimo!
Kendal:Okay, less than a week to go and my muse is working in overtime. For Nano I decide to attempt my first ever murder/suspense/mystery. I knew I needed to have a grasp on my heroine’s character growth, what she was trying to solve and who the bad guy was. But like any good mystery, I wanted to the ‘who dunnit’ to have the reader guessing until close to the end so I need a plot dense enough to accommodate more than one suspect/lead.
Let me tell you, I was freaking! I lost sleep over not knowing all the details and stressed over how to get from A to B and end with C. But as I sit down and write my 2 K a day for nano, I’m finding I must trust my muse to help me fill in the gaps. Holy moly! Letting go has been so free and productive. I still struggle with my word count every day, but I am getting there (I’m at 38,000 – so 12,000 left in 6 days!). My jaw almost hit the floor when a main character turned out to be gay! Wait one freaking minute…he was suppose to have a crush on my female protagonist. What happened? I sat back and studied the story and plot to see why something unknown to me compelled me to change a MAJOR thing mid way. Well, well, well. Looking at it with fresh eyes I realized not only does it work, but it makes the story much stronger. I think my muse deserves a big slice of chocolate cake for this one!
April, I know you mainly plotted (snow flaked) your nano novel. Did you find yourself giving into the muse and going off track at all?
April: It’s interesting. I let my muse take me on all kinds of trips while I was plotting and doing character development but once I got to it, my muse mostly focused on the nit picky details. It did try to take me off in new directions a few times … that was when I ended up cutting over 1000 words. It ended up the way I wanted but man oh man… my muse was showing her frustrations at the end when she wanted to take me on journeys she couldn’t take during the rest of the book.

I definitely enjoyed this better than any other write up. My muse and I came up with a compromise. I kept notes on things she wanted to do and add and I just kept going and I will take those journeys in rewrite. AND  I told her she’d get more input in the outlining and Snowflake method next time.
She seems okay with that. Plus, I learned some key point – in plotting I was overanxious to get done and left out some key scenes that I wish I’d explored more during plotting.

What are some of the things you’ve learned about your muse under pressure?