- Writing Time: 01:55
- Session Word Count: 1946
- Total Word Count: 12814 (11667 par)
It’s the end of the first week. I happened to have the day off today, so I was able to sleep in and get my writing done early and without rushing. Much more relaxing than yesterday.
NaNoWriMo is a distilled, compressed writing experience, and you can think of it just like a novel. The first week to the beginning, the central two weeks to the middle, and the last week to the end. Whether or not you actually try to cover the entire plot of a novel in the month, the process still maps pretty well, in my experience.
In the classic emotional arc of novel writing, week one is the fun, creative time where you’re free to invent and discover. Everything is new and shiny. In week two and three, the experience begins to dull, as you have to build a functional story on the foundations of character, setting and plot. In the final week, the end is in sight, and even if all the components of the book aren’t exactly coming together, you can at least take solace in the fact that the pain will be over soon.
Most books have at least a few moments in the process of writing when doubt or frustration crop up. Sometimes a book feels like a disaster in progress. The general agreement seems to be that those moments usually come in the middle, not so much at the beginning or end. So the start of week two begins to usher in the part of the month where a lot of the struggle happens. I’ve certainly felt that in previous years. We’ll see how it goes this time around.
Following up my previous post, I wanted to mention that you can actually add updates for specific days and/or delete updates on the NaNoWriMo website. You just have to do it from the “stats” page. This is nice for someone like me, who writes late at night and occasionally goes over midnight. Now I can make sure my word count applies to the right day.
Words Deferred 