I write slower than I read. Sometimes I forget that.

After getting to 8600 words (still more or less on track) in my NaNoWriMo novel, I've had a couple situations where I was trying to capture an action scene that was going on in my head. I'd be typing and typing, and feeling like I was going too slow, my description was holding the pace back, and the whole thing was going to go flat.

Once I was done with the scene, I looked back. There was only a page and a half there. What felt like a long, drawn-out description of menutia turned out to be very concise. It dawned on me that my anxiety was based on the fact that it had only felt slow because I was writing it. When you're reading, you aren't creating new content, and you're not limited by the relatively sluggish pace of your fingertips dancing across a keyboard with an intentionally slow-to-use character distribution (qwerty was to prevent typewriter hammers from locking up, and I never really stuck to learning dvorak).

The next scene I needed to keep an action pace for, I let more description flow. Even with nearly twice as many words per second of in-character time, the scene didn't loose it's action edge. I was pleased. I felt like I was no longer bound by some limitation of the medium. It seems, at least to a reader like me, that as a writer, I can create scenes just as I imagine them, without losing the atmosphere. It's more like filming a movie than I thought, and it's even more fun now than it was yesterday.