Step Away From the Box.

You know that box. Yeah, that’s right. That box that you keep all nice and neat. You stay within the lines and never overstep your boundaries. Even you’re surprised how well kept it is. Stop stroking it. I’m not in this for the show!

Don’t shake your head at me. I swear it’s not the rum. Hellion hid the rum. Something about rationing and all that jazz. Oh la. So I started thinking about boxes and telling Hellion. All that talking about boxes and Hellion broke out the rum again. But I didn’t have any of it. Okay maybe just a drop but it gets me outside of the box and gets my seasick head a movin’. I’m a piratess, you can’t expect me to have standards.

Here’s the thing. I know you have one. It’s the one that you keep all those preconceive notions and perfect straight lines. It’s the one that when you come to a scene where you’re even the slightest bit uncomfortable with writing, you make sure you dot your i’s and cross your t’s. Wenches it’s time to walk away from that box of expected scenes. It’s time to move out of your comfort zone and write something that makes your toes curl, your hair raise, or scare you into wetting yourself. (Though if you’re a pirate, like us, you’ll just reach for the rum bottle and drink yourself into the oblivion and skip that whole nasty wetting yourself step.)

Once when I was a wee writing pirate (almost two years ago now. WOW!) I wrote a scene to this day will cause me to cringe. Not to mention how red in the cheeks I get when I think of the countless people who’ve read it and thought to themselves, “This pirate has just a little problem with reality.” The scene was towards the end of my first fiction piece and it was rather brutal. More than rather brutal. It was a torture scene between my heroine and the super baddy guy. I stepped out of the box (really I didn’t know I had a box to step out of, but bear with me) and smudged the lines so that I could never climb back into it. Writing is about freedom. And if you’re afraid to step outside of your comfort zone, the box will be your foe in your journey as a writer. To this day, it might be some of my best writing, no matter how gutsy of a move it really was. I had no idea at the time that it was, I was just telling my story how I saw fit. And sometimes, stepping out of that box is just what a scene calls for.

As you know, this month is National Novel Writing Month (and if you didn’t know, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?! Not on this blog that’s for sure! Landlubbers… Yeesh.) For the month of November I’ve promised to blog about NaNo to keep us all thinking about our writing and promising to make deadlines and meet goals. Speaking of goals, if you’re participating in NaNo, try writing something you normally wouldn’t write. Just to have some fun. NaNo is a lot of pressure, and all that writing can kill your writing spirit. So to keep your spirit high, mix it up. Step outside of that box. It’s okay to walk away from it and not look back. It’s a box. It will still be there when you return. It will be in the same spot.

When you step away from that box (Hellion, put that box down!), what kind of scene can you imagine writing that would be out of the ordinary for your writing style? Do you excel at writing sweet tender scenes and just once want to take a ride on the wild side? This is your time to shine with your bad self! Tell us all about your out of box experience that you've had or wish you could have!