NaNoWriMo: Better Late Than Never
Possibly something that no publisher need ever know about, but the novel I'm working on right now started as a NaNoWriMo project.
Having only achieved a word count of 32,605 words, I could not declare myself a winner at the time, and I could not receive the glorious prize of Nothing Much Really. What I did win were those 32K words, a rough plot for the rest, and a determination to finish the damned thing.
I'm not quite there yet, but today saw me finally reach the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words.
32,000 words in one month.
18,000 in six.
You have to love the power of procrastination.
6 comments:
Do you think the quality of the writing is better with the slower pace though? I've always wondered if I could produce good writing at that pace.
It's hard to tell, as I haven't had distance and time to go back and read it all.
But I think it's all a trade-off: the faster writing has a more consistent feel at the expense of a certain amount of roughness, while the slower writing is more polished but perhaps a little more varied because of the time between chapters and scenes.
It's all in the revision, though, isn't it?
Yeah, it's all about the revisions. For me, the first draft of anything is my vomit draft. I just spew it out all over the page. Later on I'll see what sticks. The rest gets hosed off into the toilet.
I think the, and I use the word loosely here, discipline required for Nano is a good thing for a first draft. It forces me, at least, to shut off my internal editor and just get the words down. I don't have time to agonize over individual words. I'll be doing plenty of that in the rewrite.
Oh Stephen, the imagery! You and Dan are like "two peas in a pod" with that one *bleurgh*.
You love it!
Come on guys, lets try it again. I wrote 30,000+ words of total nonsense and possibly carpal tunnel is the best I could do. However, I learned a lot about my style and my ability to hammer out something.....I kept a few 1000 words as the core of my novel. It must be a vampire novel as it is likely to see the light of day.......
Post a Comment