Mid-Month NaNoWriMo Review
How's your NaNoWriMo going? How's mine? Well, let me tell you…
Sunday.
November 13th.
The office is empty.
Where is my underwear?
Yawn. I’m awake—barely. I thought it’s an appropriate time to post an update on this year’s NaNoWriMo and my attempt at writing 100K words instead of the usual 50K or the 80K i tried for, and hit, last year.
It’s been a busy week, what with the Twitter meltdown. I migrated over to Micro.blog and Mastodon. There were also the usual distractions of personal, and other stuff to contend with. Somehow, I had to write 3-4K words a day for a month. I often struggle with hitting 1K words a day.
So, why did I take on this self-imposed and seemingly impossible challenge?
First, and foremost, I wanted to find out if I could do it. It’s a challenge. My daily writing output is acceptable, but I’ve always felt I can do better. So, last year I tried for 80K and succeeded. That was a bit of a struggle for me.
Second, I hear and talk to people who put out a book a week (an exaggeration on my part), are terrific at art, write screenplays, comic books, have time for conferences and tours, and are part time nuclear physicists (another exaggeration)—all one person! Seriously, there are some prodigiously prolific authors out there. I wanted to figure out what their secret is. Not that I wanted to be like them, again I wanted to know if I could do it. Could I produce in a more consistent manner? Normally, I take 2-3 years to turn a book around from start to finish. Could I improve on that?
Third, and finally. I need to stretch myself and I’m crazy enough to try for 100K in 30 days.
It was a scary goal, not in an emotionally scary way, but psychically, i.e. soul & mind. It was a hurdle I wanted to overcome, but thought I might not.
I knew I would do a TON of writing and needed to prepare before November hit. I laid out the story I had in mind using Plottr (https://plottr.com). I stocked up on coffee, buckets of ice cream, and assorted good luck charms—well, maybe not the charms. November 1 hit. I slammed my fist into it. Or, I should say, I slammed my fingers into the keyboard. I should mention, I used the latest version of my writing app Auteureist (no, it’s not in the App Store). My app is in constant revision, as Apple releases new versions of devices, tools, and languages. That’s another story. But, the app is not the most stable and full-featured—yet. I had my previous version which was done, but I wanted to use the new one. I knew there were bugs and crashes. But I wanted to use it. So I did.
Anyway, back to NaNoWriMo. I had my plot. I knew what I wanted to write. I knew the story and major beats and plot points, characters, and locations. I wrote using 25 minute sprints with varying breaks in between. This was a good approach. Your mileage may vary. I was productive; I didn’t burn out or get tired, and the breaks let me think about what I would write during the next sprint. I averaged 300+ words a sprint. I had calculated that I needed a minimum of 280 in order to hit my goal (see my previous post). At the end of the first day, I’d hit and exceeded my daily goal. Yay!
It’s now the end of the 2nd week. Tomorrow will be the halfway point. How am I doing? I’m glad to say I’m keeping pace and even exceeding it a bit. I’ll hit and maybe go over 50K on the 15th.
It hasn’t been a smooth ride.
First, remember the Plottr plan I had? My characters had other lives and wanted to do things I hadn’t counted on. They took over the story. This happens more often than not with my writing. But this time, it happened in the first few scenes. The plot points went out through the wall like The Hulk, or the Kool-Aid guy. Oh yeah! I had the characters, plus a few new ones I didn’t foresee. The overall arc of the story remains, but the details veered drastically. After the first few days, I figured out how to corral my characters to maintain my important original beats.
Second, because the story had become “not my own”, I ran into slower sprints where I had to consider what had to happen next. Some scenes (my app is scene-based) aren’t as good as I would want, but this is a first draft. First drafts are supposed to be crap. This first draft is a lot better than that.
Third, I had set out to write a thriller with an insecure woman as its protagonist. I have an adventure/thriller with a strong, but unsure woman.
Finally, my app had a bug in how I was calculating the word count and some UI tweaks I needed to make. The word count bug wasn’t a problem since I was cross-checking everything against another word count tool. But, I had to take time to fix things.
The good news:
I’ve got a good story, even if it’s not the one I envisioned. It’s still going to be a series. And finally, unless something “goes south”, I’m going to hit 100K words.
So, never underestimate your abilities. Keep writing.
Word up!
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