NaNoWriMo Progress

I have reached and passed the 30,000 word mark!  This feels very momentous for me.  It is a lot of words, (109 pages so far) and it is also as far as I reached the only other time I really did NaNoWriMo, in 2008.  In ’08 I started six days late, had a busy semester at school, and hadn’t really explored the story idea at all before I started writing it.  I did the proverbial “flying by the seat of your pants” method, and when I look back on it now, am amazed it went as well as it did.  I started with a simple question out of which flowed a whole host of characters and scenarios.

This time around I went about it much more methodically.  I picked an idea I’ve had lurking in my mind for a very long time, but that I’ve never really done anything about except write an outline.  I thought about it a lot in the weeks leading up to November 1.  I thought about the characters, the storyline, the structure, the point of view, the directions it could go, why I wanted to write it, what the main theme was, etc etc.  I began thinking out the story from chapter one.  I didn’t “think out” the whole thing, but about a third or a half of it.  I figured from there I would get other ideas to carry on with.

All of this made it much easier in the long run.  The first day I wrote three-thousand words (almost twice the daily quota) simply because it was easy, having thought out the story so much beforehand.  After that things slowed down a bit, and since that first day I haven’t been much ahead but have been keeping up with the daily quota.  The ideas I had developed beforehand I’ve used now, but the story is by no means wrapped up and I am using what I have written to carry on with the rest of it.  It still helps having thought the story out so much beforehand and especially having gotten to know the characters.  That simplifies things a lot now.

I have faced some writer’s block, but it hasn’t been debilitating.  Walks, it seems like, are the best way to move past them for me.  I will take a walk and think to myself, “okay, where does the story go from here?  what happens next?  what is this or that character going to do after this?”  and those questions will put me in that character’s shoes, and I will begin walking in the characters shoes and see what they do next, who they talk to, what happens, etc, and it seems like events and scenes and conversations naturally unfold.  Then I get back and write the scenes I’ve thought out, which is usually about 1500-2000 words worth.  Then I will either think of where the story goes from there based on those scenes, or I will go through the same process in some form the next day.  So far it’s working pretty well.  I know where I want the story to ultimately end up, but there’s some things that need to happen yet before we get there.  Oddly enough, I think this story idea is almost perfect for the length required.

So it’s been an adventure, but a good one.  I am enjoying the story and have high hopes for it.  It keeps you busy, too.  If you miss even one day of writing it can be difficult to catch up, and it’s easy to miss days on weekends or whatever.  I already discovered that during my period of discouragement a week or so in.  But I’m caught up now, a little ahead, and enjoying it.

I have now tried both methods and in the future would greatly prefer the plan-ahead method to the flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method.  I tried to do that last year but the story idea didn’t go anywhere.  I guess that’s part of the danger of that method, too.  You can get really excited about something that really isn’t as exciting as it first seemed.  It really helps to know your characters beforehand.  Saves time thinking them up and getting to know them along the way.  My first year of NaNoWriMo, I think I got very lucky.

On October 30 I attended a NaNoWriMo kickoff party at the Placitas Library with my mom (she is not doing it, but was interested in finding out more about NaNoWriMo.)  It was fun to fore-gather with other writers and perspective writers, and afterwards we milled around and chatted with each other some.  We all shared what previous experience we’d had with NaNoWriMo, and afterwards I was talking to another lady and she asked me what I did or was going to do with my 30,000 words from ’08.  The truth is, after writing that story a lot of things happened in my life– big, life-changing things– and as a result, I changed a lot.  Because I have changed so much, when I look at that story now I see it needs to change a lot.  I am not the same person I was, so I can’t look at that story in the same way.  It’s hard to explain.  But there are a lot of changes that need to take place to that manuscript, and that story, before it will be ready to have anything done with it.  I have grown a lot as a writer, too, and there are many glaring faults.  So for the present, I have set that story aside.  I am still interested in the idea but there are changes that need to be made and making those changes has been more complicated than I expected.  Maybe I’m just too close to the story and need some distance before I can properly tackle it again.  So that is what I am giving myself here– by now focusing on a completely different idea.  I am excited about this novel, so I am going to devote my time and energies to it for the time being, and maybe later on I’ll be able to go back to that other one.

NaNoWriMo Update

My parents have a new dining room table, and it has become my base of operations for my novel-writing.  There are other places around the house I use: the sofa, my favorite arm-chair in our office, our bed, the kitchen table.  But I think this is my favorite so far.  I can leave my mouse, mouse-pad, flash-drives, and computer power cable set up most of the day without having to clean them off for meals or because they are in somebody’s way.  Plus it’s in a little nook away from the other side of the house that is mostly used, and next to a window with an exquisite view.  I spent an enjoyable few hours here earlier today, listening to music and working on my novel.

Speaking of the novel… I’m making good progress.  After a steady few days, the busyness picked up and I got a little behind.  Plus I went through a phase of discouragement, as all writers go through now and then.  Feeling like it was no good, and not worth going on-with.  But after a break and some encouragement from my mother-in-law, I picked up and went on, and I am fairly happy with my progress.  This is a first draft, so it’s not going to be the greatest quality, but the main thing is I get the body down– the main body of the novel.  Then I can edit from there.  But this is just about writing, even if it’s not very good.  That’s actually a really good thing.

And so the story progresses and I haven’t hit too many snags yet.  The main obstacle has been my computer, actually.  I have Ubuntu, an operating system from Lynux on my computer instead of Windows.  It has worked really well thus far, but a few days ago we updated to the new Lynux 11.10, and after that my computer began locking up randomly.  So we took it off and tried an off-shoot of Lynux called Xubuntu, which my dad has on his computer and he really likes.  Unfortunately that system didn’t like my computer either, and I had the same problem.  So finally James re-installed the version of Ubuntu that came out before 11.10, and thus far, it seems to have fixed the problems.  Hopefully they’ll get the bugs worked out of 11.10, but in the meanwhile, I am happy to have my computer back!  It may just be my particular computer that didn’t like 11.10… but at all events, this works for now.