Creative Calisthenics

My strengths:
--dialogue
--action
--ambiguously moral characters
--HUGE plots/premises

My weaknesses:
--interior monologue
--recognizable heroes/villains
--description.

I have the feeling my weaknesses stem from three causes:

1. natural tendencies/taste (hey, I was the archetypal Buffy-verse fan-girl for god's sake--no surprise my stories are packed with talking, fighting, and ammorality).

2. script-writing. In college, most of my focus was theatrical writing, and it (especially television) speaks to me in a way prose doesn't.

3. agent blogs and "how to" writing guides. Reading them has made me so fearful of boring the reader or padding a story or babbling that I've become much MUCH too harsh with my editing. This isn't a new revelation; I gave up reading "how to" books six months or so ago, and agent blogs since mid-summer.

Agents seemed, to me, to give off the impression that they're judges, arbiters of taste, and that my job is to please them. Which requires following the rules and keeping them entertained and blah blah blah. Now, I don't mean that agents feel this way, but rather: in my insecure, people-pleasing, out-of-touch way, I gave up my own agency (!)--my artistic identity and destiny--and tried to pass the responsability of my work to agents by listening to them to my work's detriment. I got scared of making my own rules and going my own way, and tried to use theirs, go theirs. I put them on a pedestal, and ruined my last novel.

Which I'm still coming to terms with. I've spent God knows how long on the edits, and it turns out my rough draft may be better.

So, in my quest to turn that into a good novel instead of a wordy script, I've decided to write in an entirely different way for my NaNo project.

The premise for my NaNo work is something I've wanted to "find time" for since early summer, and I love working on it.

And:
Unlike my previous manuscript, this one is in first person, and only has one main character.
It has clear villains, though they aren't black-hearted black hats (of course)
There is as much description and internal monologue as I can stuff in.

I've already learned that I have much more latent/instinctive knowledge about plot structure than I'd realized, that internal monologue and scene description aren't as frightening or foreign as I'd thought, and that "prep" becomes busy work relatively early in the writing process.

Of course, it's only the middle of week one, and I'm only about 10,000 words in...but so far I've been very pleasantly surprised with what "playing to my weaknesses" really means. Whether or not this manuscript ever comes of anything, it's doing wonders for my confidence and my sense of self as a writer.