No focus leads to new directions

I am learning all sorts of things about myself, my writing, and writing in general during NaNo.  First, I learned that writing is a personal experience of sorts, and that write-ins, although fun and socially invigorating, do not put any words on my page.  This does not mean that I won't go to them anymore, but it means that when I budget my writing time, I will not assume that I will write 5,000 words in one day at a write-in. 

That was a very bad assumption on my part.

I am now 21 days into NaNo and the good news is that I have written over 34,000 words, which puts me almost exactly on target with NaNo's guidelines of 1,667 words per day.  Unfortunately, it puts me about 8,000 words behind on my own personal schedule because I got absolutely nothing written during the write-in last week and then promptly followed that up with several days of slacking.  Write or Die got me back on track, but I'm still behind enough that I'm contemplating taking my laptop to my husband's family's annual Thanksgiving trip, which I had hoped to avoid.  I guess I have four more days to pull it together before then.

But I digress.  I am writing to give an update on my crazy venture into life without outlines, and I am pleased to say that it is working--sort of.  I identified a "plot part II" for my characters, killed one off, and let the others go at it any way they choose.  The interesting thing is that without having an outline that defines where I am heading, my characters have reacted more naturally to the situations that I put them in and I have new ideas about how to formulate the beginning of the story now that I have a new idea for the end.  I actually like the direction the book is going now much more than I did when I started writing it.  I recognize that the disorganization and changing course halfway through would result in very necessary and extensive rewriting, but I never intended this story to be read by anyone else anyway so that's not the issue.

The bigger problem is that, in my "real world" job, I write constantly, and I live and die by the outline.  I write strictly non-fiction in my day job, and I typically prepare an outline, write the piece, extract an outline from what I've written, and then reorganize, rewrite, and polish.  It is a very functional process for the line of work that I do.  Unfortunately, the fiction that I wrote this month using this process sounds a lot like the non-fiction I write, and that is not a good thing.

So, I guess my point is that I'm 10,000 words into my crazy experiment and it's working.  It's shaking me up and making me better.  What are you doing to get yourself moving in a new direction?