A few potential scenes from my NaNo book.
National Novel Writing Month ended last night at midnight. And 6 minutes later I updated my word count to 40,118 words.
Officially, this makes me a NaNo loser. To be a winner I needed 50,000. I pretty much knew from the outset this wasn't going to happen. But I wrote like mad anyway -at least on days that I could write at all.
There was part of me that hated writing this way - just cranking out words and not paying attention to how they were put together. Finding my story as I go is normal for me but finding it at the NaNo pace was painful! Especially since I'm now expecting a package in the mail that contains a particularly beautiful and helpful memoir.
While my plot is likely not to be found in the memoir, the setting and character clues are. So during NaNoWriMo, I held back on certain scenes until I could get more info. And to be honest, the words I did write are mostly a boring narration by my main character.
I still want to crank out the last 10,000 words by the time I speak to a group of NaNoers this Friday.
And after that? I expect to delete a whole lot of words and go from telling mode into some vivid showing.
I'm very glad I did this because, even if I delete half of my words, I'll still have at least 20,000 good ones. I discovered a lot of my character's motivations, some of his best friends, and some major plot points. And that wouldn't have happened without the NaNoWriMo challenge!
I would say that considering the things you've done besides NaNo you're quite a successful winner -- and I only know bits and pieces of your schedule.
ReplyDeleteSo glad the memoir is headed your way!
Keep typing and I bet you'll meet Friday's goal. ;-)