Tag: fiction writing process

• Writing Time: 01:15
• Session Word Count: 1724 
• Total Word Count: 45694 (43333 par)

In today’s session, my characters survived their watery journey and had a heart-to-heart chat. This is another case where I like the general shape of the emotional beats, but I’m going to have to go back and add more lead-up to this conversation so that it makes sense and feels meaningful.

Since I’m more than a day ahead on word count, 50,000 words feels very close at hand. I can try to go hard and finish in two days, or take it easy and finish in three. Unlike some previous years, this has been a fun and relatively low-stress NaNoWriMo, and I’ve managed to stay ahead the entire time. If that takes some of the drama out of my own personal NaNoWriMo plot arc…well, I’m okay with that.

This November has also reminded me of the aspects of NaNoWriMo that I enjoy, and I think I’m going to start participating more regularly again. I might even check out some of the other NaNoWriMo events throughout the year.

Maybe most interestingly, I’ve been reminded of the fun of being a little less rigorous about my writing prep, and I’ll be taking that into my future projects.

• Writing Time: 01:20
• Session Word Count: 1835
• Total Word Count: 43970 (41667 par)

The great gift of NaNoWriMo is a simple goal with no value judgements.

I once read that in order to be a writer, you need to develop a sort of schizophrenic mindset, where you simultaneously have complete faith in your work, but also see every single flaw. This is so you don’t give up on writing altogether, but you’re still driven to edit and polish until it’s as good as possible. It can be incredibly hard to keep that balance. If you’re anything like me, on a given day you probably fall more into one camp than the other. I don’t find a happy medium so much as vacillate wildly between extremes.

NaNoWriMo says, “turn that editor off.” Neil Gaiman’s glib description of writing is, in this case, perfectly correct: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done.” At the end of the month, you may not have a good story or a complete story, but you’ve at least got a brand new collection of 50,000 words in an order that nobody has ever arranged them before. It’s an ephemeral and somewhat arbitrary achievement, but hey, so is finishing a marathon or eating seventy hot dogs in a sitting, and we celebrate those.

Today’s session followed yesterday’s thoughts about causing more trouble for my characters. Sure, they’re already swimming between islands in a thick fog that prevents them from seeing the shore, but in the spirit of really ruining their day, I had them nearly run over by a ferry boat. They lost a pack and the compass that was helping them stay on course, and got split up. Now we’re having a good time.

I didn’t plan for these problems, so I’m off the edge of the map at the moment. I’ll have to figure out how to resolve them before I can continue with the plot as planned. Should be fun.

• Writing Time: 01:45
• Session Word Count: 1843
• Total Word Count: 42135 (40000 par)

On Day 7, I talked about how the middle of NaNoWriMo, like the middle of the book, tends to be the hardest part. Good news: the middle is over. We’re down to the final week. The finish line is in sight. If you’re participating and you’ve been struggling, don’t give up now. You’ve got this.

It’s also a good time to start thinking about what happens at the end of NaNoWriMo. Will you wrap up the story, or only finish the first 50,000 words? For my novel, I only expect to be about halfway done by the end of November. (And by “done,” I mean halfway through the plot, not through the actual writing process.) After November, I plan to write up some notes while they’re fresh in my mind, and set it aside to finish later—maybe during a different NaNoWriMo event.

At the end of this session, I left my characters swimming in cold water, in the fog, between islands that they’re not familiar with. One of my writing challenges is that I’m not very good at putting challenging obstacles in the way of my characters. My instinct is to set up problems that I know they can solve with the skills they have. I’m trying to remedy that. With my sketchy outline, that mostly means dropping the characters into bad situations, and then trying to figure out how they would get out of them in unexpected or interesting ways.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to get them to a new island, and maybe get to the point of revealing the antagonist that has been hinted at for most of the book, but not yet appeared.

• Writing Time: 01:10
• Session Word Count: 1811
• Total Word Count: 40292 (38333 par)

For my American readers, happy Thanksgiving! No surprise, I spent most of the day preparing and eating food, and spending time with family. I got to my writing after I put the kids to bed. This session, I was strictly going for speed so I wouldn’t have to stay up too late, and I succeeded pretty well. I don’t think the quality of the writing suffered too much for it, although I may change my mind when I come back to this part later on.

My characters have finished their information gathering, and escaped before they could be caught. Now they need to get to a different island to try to find the antagonist and his goon squad. But that’s a problem for tomorrow.

• Writing Time: 01:30
• Session Word Count: 2064
• Total Word Count: 38481 (36667 par)

I wrote close to the bare minimum yesterday, but I really wanted to get back to the point where I was a full day ahead of par. So I started earlier today and closed the gap, plus a little extra.

My characters are on one of the prison islands—one hidden and one posing as a new trainee guard. They know that they’ll eventually be found out for impersonating the real trainee, so they’re gathering information and planning to sneak off before the powers-that-be catch up with them.

Impersonating a trainee provides the opportunity to get a basic understanding of how things work on the islands and within the prison system, as well as in the mines where many of the prisoners are forced to work. This surface-level understanding will eventually be complicated as they uncover some of the more nefarious things going on.

Next session, I’ll engineer their escape and journey to a different island, where things really start to get dangerous for them.

• Writing Time: 01:45
• Session Word Count: 1702
• Total Word Count: 36417 (35000 par)

Today I drew a map. It’s a very ugly map, so I won’t reproduce it here. It was strictly to get a basic understanding of how the islands are laid out and what buildings and features are on each one. This was a useful exercise, because I almost immediately had to revise the layout to fix inconsistencies.

The thing about making maps (for me, at least) is that I always add way more detail than I need to. Based on the story beats I have planned, there are really only three or four things that need to be on that map. But when I started drawing, I immediately added more islands than I needed to. Seven seems like a nice prime number and leaves lots of room for adding stuff. Then I drew some buildings, and I had to figure out what purpose they might serve. I quickly ended up with a lot.

This feels like one of those background exercises that is probably mostly “wasted” time, in that only one out of five of those things will actually have any bearing on the story. But it’s right in line with the rest of my NaNoWriMo process this year—over-build and over-plot and follow digressions to find the fun bits, and then eventually rewrite and trim back later.

Even if nothing useful were to come of it, drawing maps is always fun.

• Writing Time: 01:35
• Session Word Count: 1730 
• Total Word Count: 34715 (33333 par)

Happy Threes Day! We’re officially 2/3 done and the par is 33333 words.

Today, my characters stole someone’s identity and finally made it onto the boat. That trip and their arrival on the islands filled my quota, so I will need to start figuring out the details of the islands in the next session.

While I have some ideas of what’s coming soon, I’m finding that my rough summary of the story only covers about half of the scenes I end up writing. This feels like a pretty good mix for NaNoWriMo. If I have to really solve each scene before I write, it slows me down. This way, I either have a somewhat defined scene or know where I need to go after the current scene. So I have some wiggle room to come up with things on the fly, but still enough definition that I’m not floundering.

Comically, I discovered yet another loose end that needed to be wrapped up today. I pushed through it (probably faster than I really ought to have) and the characters ended this writing session on a ship, on their way to the islands that I’ve been talking about for at least a week now. The change of scenery is nice, but I’m wondering if it will feel easier or harder to move to a new setting after spending quite a bit of time getting used to this one.

Once again, I was able to put in a little extra time and boost the word count, trying to get at least a day ahead of par. With any luck, I should be able to get there by tomorrow.

• Writing Time: 02:30
• Session Word Count: 2085
• Total Word Count: 30857 (30000 par)

I’m back in the saddle again, getting in a couple longer writing sessions and boosting my word count.

I’m happy that I was able to bank some extra words before missing a day, and it’s nice to be on vacation and able to immediately work on getting that count back up. I’ve had years where I fell behind early, and it’s demoralizing to know that you need to write even more just to stay on pace.

Today’s story involved some breaking and entering, scaling a wall, and a brief fistfight. And with that, my characters have finally done what needed to be done on shore. Next session, they head out to sea.

• Writing Time: 00:00
• Session Word Count: 0
• Total Word Count: 28772 (28333 par)

Well, it finally happened. The inevitable 0-word day. I was absorbed in chores during the morning and early afternoon, and then went out to a multi-person birthday celebration in the evening. I didn’t write at all. Now I’m out of the running for getting every single one of the badges on the NaNoWriMo website (which admittedly is not that big of a deal).

The good news is that I’ve been slowly getting ahead of par, so I was able to miss a day without actually falling behind. Hopefully I’ll be able to jump ahead again in the next few days.