NaNoWriMo: The End

I gave up. According to early projections, I would have been finished by now. In terms of word count, I'm still technically on course to complete on time, even though I've not written a word for a week. I was a fast writer back in those days.

Something bad happened. Something pretty devastatingly life-changing and personal, and I took some days off from writing the novel, safe in the knowledge that I'd built myself a six-day buffer. And then, when I came back to my computer... I just couldn't do it. More than that, I just didn't want to.

It's probably because I lost momentum, I know. But it also seems a bit stupid now, writing a novel in a month. It's not going to be good, is it? You'll never be proud of the work, beyond the fact that you have done the work, and if you can't be proud of it, I'm struggling to see the point.

It's not hard to imagine that come next November, I'll be desperate to do another NaNoWriMo. But I'm hoping that that will follow a year of having tried to write a novel in normal time and failing, and not because I couldn't be bothered to do any writing in the months of the year that aren't November. (Obviously my hope is that I won't be doing NaNo at all because I'll have successfully written a novel in the forthcoming year, but... baby steps.)

This could all be justification for my quitting, of course, but really if I needed justification, I already had the Bad Thing. I think this was genuinely a good choice. I want to continue the novel (perhaps with a big rewrite of the first 25k words!), and finish it in my own time, and for it to be great. That's what I want.

NaNoWriMo, Day 9: Everything is FINE

Ish.

I just about got to the halfway point today. I don't as pleased as I hoped I might, to be honest. I feel like the book has slightly lost its magic.Maybe because I'm at that middle third now, book-wise, or maybe because I plotted badly, or I just started too fast out of the blocks and now I'm tired. I think I may give myself a day off if I continue to have bad writing days. I want to find myself hilarious again!!!!

Current word count: 25079

NaNoWriMo, Day 8: Sorry I'm Late

Yesterday, I work travelled, and was out of the house from 6.30am to 11.30pm, so I wasn't able to blog. I was, however, able to write on the trains, so I did complete the word count. I would say that it's probably the worst two thousand words I've written so far. It felt like a bit of a slog and, criminally, I don't think any of it was very funny.

Still, onwards and upwards, as your mum says. Today will almost certainly be better... if I only I weren't so damn TIRED! Pity me. Oh, also, I should be hitting the halfway mark today. Yes!

Current Word Count: 23,018

NaNoWriMo, Day 7: We're in Heaven

We're not really in Heaven. It just rhymes with seven. Having said that, I have started getting in to the religious aspects of the novel a bit more today, which will play a bigger and bigger part as the novel progresses. That's fun.

I like talking about religion and people who follow religion; it makes me feel like my first degree wasn't a big fat waste of time. It is quite difficult writing about religion in a way that is both funny and inoffensive, but I suppose the beauty of NNWM is that you don't overthink or talk yourself out of these kinds of things.

I'm now pretty far ahead of schedule (five days), so I should comfortably meet the deadline. In fact, all going well, I am hoping to get something like 60-70k down, and beyond that, I will hopefully keep going until I reach the end of the book (I'm guessing about 80k, but WHO KNOWS?!)

Tomorrow, I'll be travelling for work, for the first time this month. Which means, I'll basically only have the train from Bristol to Didcot and back again to do any writing. Hopefully this will be enough. Blogging may be difficult...

Current Word Count: 20,974

NaNoWriMo, Day 6: In the Mix

Today, I wanted to get loads of words down but yet again I am doing a thing, so writing time has been cut short. Having said that, I have written nearly 3000 words today, so it's not like I've done nothing. It just feels that way for some reason. Today, though, I have been updating the future plot a lot, inspired by the things I've already written. I'm finding it helpful, slightly adjusting my plans as I go along.

UPDATE: Since I wrote that last paragraph, I have done the thing that I was going to do, and am back home, waiting to do the other thing that I am going to do (namely... watching Downton Abbey).

Oh, today, I need to back up what I've done so far. It's Backup Sunday (previously known, of course, Downton Sunday)!

Current Word Count: 17,798

Finally, what you've all been waiting for... yesterday's croquembouche!

Yes, that's my very own finger in the background, cooling down after a run in with sugar lava. We made it by doing this, this and this:

NaNoWriMo, Day 5: Fivember

Bit busy today. Wrote some but not loads. Made a croquembouche. Drank mulled things on top of Brandon Hill, looking out over the whole of Bristol, while a million fireworks did explosions. Had friends over for drinks. Got a Magic Roll. Didn't do much writing but I did enough. Feel like I may be slightly delirious with tiredness. More tomorrow.

Current Word Count: 14,872

NaNoWriMo, Day 4: Pfft.

Last night, we went to a very fancy restaurant, determined to spend lots of money. While we were there, we bumped into a friend of mine and his girlfriend. Suffice it to say, much fun was had by all (in a weird way, we all kind of got excited by theprospect of the other diners thinking we were just two random couples who'd hit it off) and I got drunk on fancy wine.

I also ate some amazing food (see below foodies), but mostly I got drunk. Which meant that today, I did not feel much like doing anything. I went to work, obviously, and I did my work. I even spoke politely to people and nobody even knew! But then came writing time, and it took me a lot longer than usual to get started.

I know a lot of people say that when you're writing, you should never finish a chapter, because then the next day you have to start by opening a chapter, but I don't think I find it any easier to start in the middle of a chapter! Well I did start, eventually, and I got my words done, so I did. Actually, I got at least double the words done. I wonder if they're good. Eh.

I spoke briefly to a friend who's NaNo-ing too today and we both agreed that this year is easier. Maybe it's because of the weather, or our situations in life these days, but I like to think that it's because we're getting better at it. I hope we are. In any case, I have to say, four days in, I'm really enjoying NaNoWriMo this year.

FOOD!

Beetroot (three ways, including salt baked, with goats cheese and an olive crumble).

Rabbit (ballantine with pickled carrots and a damson sauce - BTW pickled carrots are my favourite thing int he world now).

Mushroom and white chocolate gateau (I didn't take a photo because I'd already embarrassed everyone enough but rest assured, it was weird and delicious.)

PS. Last night, I ate more flower petals than I ever had in my whole life combined before last night. If that makes sense.

NaNoWriMo, Day 3: You Can Never Go Home Again(?)

Today was a nice writing day. I did a bit before work, a bit at lunch, and a lot after work. I wrote fewer words than the previous days, but I think they're better, more engaging ones, so I'm not too sad about it. And it was still something like 2,500, and that's a lot.

I'm past all the scene-setting now and in to the fun-happening. I realise that first chapters should be fun too, as they're the most read, and I'm sure that some parts of my first chapters are fun to read, but they weren't always fun to write. My third chapter has been super fun to write. I've set it in the village I grew up in, and have inadvertently led the reader from the local car park to my old house. Is that legal if you don't live there anymore...?

Also, I'm already having to move back some plot points because I've written more fully than I'd planned, so I imagine my beloved storyboard is going to look quite different when this is all over. Maybe I'll post another picture of it after the first week to show you how it's changed. Would you like that? I bet you would.

That's it for today. I'm going out for a fancy dinner (here) and won't be back til late. Did you notice how I didn't even mention a graph today? I am so over graphs. My face though, is smiling, so that's something.

Current word count: 9358

NaNoWriMo, Day 2: Day 1: The Sequel

Today has been just like yesterday, except much longer and not nearly as good. There was a time, a happy, yesterday kind of a time, when I grew to like my writing, and thought that my novel was going to be brilliant. It was all inventive and funny and well-written and stuff. What a boob I was back then.

Spinning out of bad day of work, I've felt somewhat dejected and sick feeling. Which has almost certainly come out in my writing. I've written nearly as many words as I did yesterday, but I can't help but feel that they're probably a bit lifeless and drawn out.

I dunno, maybe I'm just no good at the set up parts. Maybe it'll get better once my story really kicks off (is it OK to have written six thousand words without much having happened yet? I'm not sure).

Today, my graph of writing life is very much a frowny face. Still, word count wise, I'm about 12% of the way through the month already! Clever Rhysy

Current word count: 6065

NaNoWriMo, Day 1: (Just Like) Starting Over

Yesterday, I flagrantly boasted about my NaNo smug/time graph and how over the month I would run the gamut of emotions. Well, check this: it's day one and I've already done ALL of the emotions. Admittedly, they were fleeting, not deep and fatigue-laden like they will undoubtedly become, but I've been through it all.

This morning, there was The Fear of Starting Things, as there always is, and then I went through the Depression of Being a Terrible, Terrible Writer, which stretched from lunchtime until about mid-afternoon. And then I made myself Chuckle With My Own Inventiveness and Wit (I may be stretching the capitalisation now, sorry), before I eventually began to Like My Writing by dinnertime.

Thinking back, this does all feel vaguely familiar. Maybe the beginning wasn't quite as fun and easy as I have managed to convince myself. Reading back, the first few chapters of last year's book were by far the most uninteresting and aimless. It was really only by the middle of the book that I'd got into the groove and started to enjoy it, and it was the end where I lost steam and went whole days without doing any writing. My smug/time graph won't look like a smiley face at all! It'll look like a bell curve or, to those without a C-grade Maths A-level, a Big Fat Frowny Face.

:(

Current word count: 2134

NaNoWriMo, Day 0: A Prelude to November

I have a clipboard. It has plans on it. It has story plans, and sub-story plans, and coloured stickers, and post its. Writing-wise, I don't think I've ever been prouder of myself.

Last time I did NaNoWriMo, I didn't have a clue what I'd be writing about, and I wasn't even sure of who the characters would be. This time, they're all fairly well-defined in my head, and will hopefully be able to speak, through my hands, on the page in a reasonably convincing way.

And I know all of the events! That's good, isn't it? It's nice to build to something. I spent about three quarters of my last novel alluding to something that I had made up yet, and it just kind of meandered to a conclusion that I scrapped together from what I'd sort of laid down in all of the building up. I don't think it was great. This time, I know the ending, and how the main character arrives there. Yay me.

This post serves as a smug, old warning. I am going to be posting on here every day, a short little post, to update on my NaNoWriMo progress. I predict the smugness graph will look something like a smile.

:)

Writing Novels and Things #13: Making Deadlines

Before I start this post, I just want to say that everything I said in my last post is still true: I have begun editing my first novel (again). In the first paragraph I saw, which I had apparently already edited, I found about eighty mistakes. It was excellent. Still, I am persevering on account of how it is good for me, and things.

HOWEVER, I have also decided that I am going to write another novel. And this novel will be written in November, or 50,000 words of it, and I will be doing it with others. That's right, I'm doing NaNoWriMo again! I said I wouldn't but I will. And the reason that I am doing it again is, mostly, because it makes me write, and the reason it makes me write is because it gives me, to all intents and purposes, a daily deadline.

Writers are, I imagine, like most people, and like to procrastinate. I like to procrastinate a lot. When I'm not procrastinating, I imagine that I like getting things done, but in those times I am completely deluding myself. I like not getting things done, if they don't need doing quite yet. I love writing, but I also like, well, lots of other things and some of these things are a bit easier than writing, so sometimes I do those things instead. Things like watching Hollyoaks and making hummus and eating hummus, things like that.

But when I have a deadline, and certainly one that is imminent, I work hard, like a normal person who likes working hard. When I was doing my CW masters, I read all the books and wrote loads in and out of the classes, because the deadlines were weekly, and I had to do all that work to be good for the next lesson. I barely went out for two years, outside of term-time, and I felt very pleased with myself.

NaNoWriMo is a bit like doing a masters, except it's about 1/24th the duration and involves far less reading and much more writing. When I did it last year, I very rarely felt stressed by the experience, I was just happy. It's satisfying, being able to tick off your word counts every day, you see, and, also, writing all the time is a bloody pleasure. You get to make things up and then make them real! It's pretty sweet.

This year, I have only vague ideas about the novel I want to write. I know I want it to be an comic adult fantasy novel (and by 'adult', I don't mean sexy, I just mean not 'young adult'), and I have some notion of characters and setting, but nothing very concrete. Which is fine! The best part of NaNoWriMo for me last year was watching my own story unfold and evolve before me. I barely even knew what was going to happen then (which would be obvious if you'd seen the first draft - which you will not!).

When I get round to writing my proper literary novel, I will be planning intensely, and crafting as I go, and the writing will take me a lot longer than a month. I don't know if NaNoWriMo (incidentally, the most irritating word to type in all existence) produces good-quality literature, possibly not, but for me it has been so useful in showing me that I can write a book, even if writing a good book is still somewhat beyond me.

This time, I am going to let the lesson stay learned. I am going to give myself a daily deadline for writing (say, 300 words) and I am going to stick to it come hell or high water. Definitely.

Also, this now gives me a deadline less than a month to finish editing my last book. Please do nag me about this.

Writing Novels and Things #7: 10,001 hours (and things that are good)

I just want to touch on the 10,000 hour thing again for this post, if briefly, because I've been thinking about it a lot. Also, Funds For Writers have just launched an essay competition, which is more or less along the same lines (Diligence), and I think I want to enter it.

(I wish I were Jewish, by the way, because I have a brilliant title for it, which would only make sense if I were Jewish. Fortunately, I am writing a short story that it also fits into, so the brilliant title will not go unused. I once seriously considered Judaism conversion, on a side note to this side note, and I took a class in Biblical Hebrew, but I didn't follow through. Anyway.)

So, the important thing about these 10,000 hours, I have discovered, thanks to the excellent article below, that these 10,000 hours must not be a mindless, unfocused slog whereby you churn out reams and reams of words (so Nanowrimo novels and Morning Pages may not count) just to say that you have. You need to learn from them, every time you write. You need to be looking into technique, structure, style, and all aspects of the craft when you're writing, or you're just reinforcing bad habits.

Put succinctly: Bad drivers don’t get better at driving. They just get better at being bad drivers.

So that's something to think about and has possibly changed the way I write entirely. I have been, at various stages, and still now, what is known in the writing community as a 'discovery writer' or 'pantser', which is a writer who doesn't really plan things and just writes. I have found in the past that this approach is quite effective, and often pleasantly surprising, but not always. And it would be more effective and pleasantly surprising if you were already an expert (i.e. you'd done your 10,000 hours), so writing well was instinctive, rather than lucky. So I'm going to try planning and plotting and things for a while, and see how that goes. In theory, it should mean that I have to do less of the dreary editing stuff, which I don't enjoy (apart from, occasionally, in my day job). 

I shall, no doubt, keep my public informed.

Now on to some nicer things, which means articles that say what I want them to say to make me feel good about my writing.

This one: Why Most of What You’ve Read About Characterization is Untrue

Is good.

Mostly, it's saying that originality (in this case with respect to characterisation but I think it works across the board) is in the way you tell a story, rather than the basic outline of the story. Because most of the stories have been told, but they haven't all been told in every conceivable way yet! For example, there's a story about a strong teenaged girl who falls in love with a vampire and it kind of tears both their lives apart. You could tell it one way, a la Twilight, or you could tell it the good way, and be Buffy. Broadly, they have similar stories, but it's in the telling that they vary so wildly. 


(This is probably not the best comparison, as they are told in different media, but you get the idea.)


When I was doing my masters, and novel work shopping, this one guy I knew was writing a really funny book that was essentially a diary of someone addicted to a well-known social media site. I always looked forward to the lessons where we'd workshop his stuff, because I knew I'd be able to read some witty, sharp, and pretty original, diarist writing that was always interesting. He always had a problem with it though, because he felt the plot was unoriginal, and I could feel him stalling on the whole project until he could think of a way to write a plot (and action and things) that nobody had ever thought of before. I don't know if it ever sank in but I would beg him not to think about that, because the thing that was special about his writing was the way he was writing, and there were no original stories anyway. I haven't heard from him since the course ended, but I do hope he finishes the novel, because it was very good, I thought.


So I thought that article was encouraging, selfishly, because that's what I believe and that is, I think, what makes my writing good. I have written a lot of speculative fiction (and the two short stories I've had published do fall within that genre), but I don't really see myself as a far-out ideas man. And I don't think you need to be to be a successful writer, is what I think! All completely justified by the above article.


Also, because I realise that this post is getting a bit long, this other article is fun, and quite informative:

Five More Mistakes That Will Expose You As a Rookie

I have to confess that some of these are new to me (fonts, character not being as important as story) and some I know but don't always follow (back story dumps) but a lot of them I already follow, instinctively (dialogue, names, first person). This is good, because it means that I am learning! Actually, it means that I have learnt! 10,000 hours, here I come.