Well I have been slightly quiet about Nanowrimo but tonight I passed a MASSIVE milestone: I wrote more words today than I have left to write before I reach the 50,000.
This does not mean I'm going to get there tomorrow necessarily, but it does leave me a mere (ha!) 2328 words shy of the grand total with seven days to go.
This is an achievement I am happy with. The writing, well not so much. Actually that's inaccurate. I'm very pleased with the writing - it's just the words I have a problem with. The process of thinking, persevering, setting aside time, repeatedly hitting the keys, sitting down when I didn't want to, when I didn't care, when I had no idea what to say, making myself do it and make words appear, make people say things, do things, just to fill a relentlessly endless page - that has been totally awesome and has transformed writing for me from something abstract into a real physical activity. I am delighted with the writing.
But yeah, a LOT of the words, sentences, whole chapters are awful. Utterly, indescribably bad. I know you'll think I am not a fair judge of my own work, but I can be really very objective when I want to and a good 20,000 words of what I have written is unremittingly foul. That's okay. It meant that when I wrote something good (or well) then I really noticed and that was also delightful.
I started off trying to novelise a dream I had had. You might not be surprised to learn that I now think that was a dumb idea. It went well to begin with but it was unsustainable without some serious planning. At about fifteen thousand words I began to worry that I was running out of story. But I persevered. I extrapolated. I lensed in, exploring relationships between characters. I added twists. Moved locations. At all costs, I swore, I would not give up! I banged my head on kitchen tables. I drank coffee. I drank bourbon. I drank tea. I drank beer. I wrote in the garden. I wrote at my desk. I wrote in Starbucks. I wrote on the plane, hunched over a laptop that was so squashed it was nearly folded shut.
It was horrible. Painful. Dispiriting. I still kept going. It got a bit better. I had already written up the dream, in incredible detail, much of it twice and then much more. But I was breathing stale air into a dead story.
At 28179 words and 17 days I stopped writing that story. I switched. I dusted off a plan for a novel I had made several years ago, and written only a few hundred words of. I scratched those and I started again. I wrote 5000 words the first day and I've almost hit 20,000 a week later. Having a plan makes an enormous difference. But so does writing something that is supposed to be a story, rather than a dream.
I'm not abandoning the dream story. It's no more than a distended metaphor, but I think there's a very long short story/ very short novella there. It's not uninteresting, just unformed. I'll go back later and polish and cut and so forth and at some point during that process I'll nail the focal length of the thing and it will be fine. And in the meantime I will continue with my new work in progress until I hit 50,000 total for the month and then I'll submit.
No, it's not an ideal first Nanowrimo, but in a way, it has been perfect. They talk of there being two kinds of writers for this thing: planners and pantsers, the latter being those who just wing it by the seat of their pants. Well, at my first attempt I've tried both approaches and learned an awful lot more as a result.
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