Zen Ken

National Novel Writing Month is over

For me it's been over for about three days.  I got to 50,000 words on Saturday and just kind of dragged anchor at that point, though I knew I was only halfway through my novel at the very least.  My own lessons learned:

1. I paced myself this time, though I was almost as loose structure-wise as I was in the second book.    In the second book I wrote for a few days and didn't touch it for 20 days and had a mad as hell three day dash to 50,000, writing nearly 40,000 words of garbage to get there.  I'm even afraid sometimes to read that book as much of a trainwreck as I felt it was.  This time around, come hell or high water, I wasn't going to let the word count get behind.  I was relaxed and though I didn't feel I had a great handle on the story, it flowed pretty well compared to sweating to the end.  I liken it to the difference between undergraduate (book 2 dash) and graduate (book 3) level of effort.

2.  I joked about trying to get to 75,000 or even to 100,000.  Most days I pushed myself beyond the 1,667 word daily count to get to 2,500.  There were a few days in November where I just didn't have time to write, and the extra word count helped.  I knew in my head that 50,000 was my goal and when I hit it, I pretty much stopped all real effort in writing.  I did enjoy pushing myself beyond the limits to get my word count high early on.

3.  Having all the time in the world is an out and out fallacy.  I had the entire week off last week just as I had last year and the year before.  Yet I found myself struggling to dig in and find the will to write.  It's a normal problem, and something I struggle with work.  I hate being idle and once I am, I find it hard to get things done.  When I'm busy I can move mountains and be extremely productive.  Idle time is terrible time.  Thousands of people quit their jobs to write the Great American Novel and thousands end up going back to work not writing anything of substance.  Creativity is Work - albeit enjoyable work.  You have to put boundaries on yourself and put your nose to the grindstone.

Things I'll do next year:

1. Plan a complete novel from beginning to ending.

2. Write 75,000 words.

3. Schedule and plan my idle time.

Next year will be a new book and a completely new effort at writing a novel.

 

Close to halfway

I'm at 20,000 words already.  Things are moving along in my novel.  I'm doing my best to start wrapping up the threads that have been around since the first and the second novel.  It's causing me to hop between character POVs, and that's fine.  It's something that can't be helped, though for the most part I wanted to tell the story from the third woman's point of view.

I feel I'm being a bit obvious in parts of my story and I'll have to tone them down a bit on rewrite.  Don't want things to feel that obvious, but it's currently working for me because the story is moving forward.

I have been avoiding the NaNoWriMo forums, for the most part.  Honestly, I just find that reading about other people's struggles and stories to just be... boring.  They have stories that have extremely flat plots or characters that seem interesting but that's about the extent of their writing acumen.  I'm just not a group player when it comes to writing, I guess.  It's just a lot of posting and reading when I could just be thinking and writing my story.  Some people seem to be really prolific - here it is 11 days into NaNo and they are past 100k.  I don't think NaNo is really for them if they are able to bang out 100,000 words in 10 days.  They need an editor.  100,000 words is about 350 pages of writing, give or take.  That's quite a bit, and I feel that though I'm juggling a lot of plot threads, I'm leaving a lot out that I am not including.  My new research list is growing longer by the day.

Last year I went to a write-in.  It was not what I thought it would be, and I find that I do work best on my own.  I don't want to be distracted by other people talking about their stories.  The people I was with didn't do that, but I just didn't feel the need to go any more to feel like I'm writing a story.  It confirms my theory that I'm not a group writer.  I don't need a committee to tell me where to go in my plot.  I'll either figure it out myself, or change it all on rewrite.

Finally, I find that writing the final book to a trilogy really leaves you with a lot of material that you had skipped over in the first two books.  Heck, I think my second book is terrible and my first book, though better, skips a lot in order to race towards the preconceived ending.  Writing the end to a story is a great way to go back and fix the beginning and try to get the middle to bridge them.

I think I have 75,000 words in me this year.  Possibly 100,000, but I'm going to stick with a number that is realistic with my writing capacity and time.