Happy Thursday! How are you all liking your winter weather now? I mean, because ours just started and I can't deny that it's winter anymore. And wow, was Thursgiving only a week ago?! It was. Amazing.
So, National Novel Writing Month was the thirty days of November. Its purpose: encourage writers to "just do it." The task: write a novel-length project (identified as 50,000 words, more accurately a novella) over the course of the month. Mathematically, writing 1,667 words a day would enable a writer to finish right on schedule.
I'm happy to announce that as of November 29th, I logged 50,061 words. I won! This will prove my results. If you click on the "Nano Stats" tab, you'll be able to see the bar graph I spent half the month staring at. It came pre-loaded with the gray bars, marking the additional 1,667 words for each day, for you to compare your progress against.
I like that my results were more or less steadily rising, with the notable exception of the end of the second week where I stayed two days behind for three sets of days. As you might guess, that's when the reality of the project was hitting, a week where I said, "I did enough writing, I'm gonna go play video games and catch up later." Which I told myself was okay, because I knew I was going to catch up. I knew I was going to finish.
The biggest impact NaNoWriMo had on my month was that suddenly I had to write every day. Duh. You might think that that stipulation would not be as shocking to someone like myself, who you might imagine as someone who writes all the time. But my secret is that I rarely write, unless the mood strikes. But in November, regardless of mood--or availability of ideas--I had to sit down and write. And I couldn't play video games or watch movies, because I always had to write first, so I would make the quota for the day.
Sometimes I would stay up past the day cut-off, just matching the previous day's goal before I went to sleep. Then the next day it would feel like I would only have to do 1,667 more, even though, chronologically, I'd logged a couple hundred words that day already. But that plan wouldn't always work, like when I had to be up in the morning to work. Or if I knew I'd be at work until 10 or 11 at night, that wasn't enough time before midnight to slam out what needed to be slammed out. So I had to be mindful of the time I was spending on every activity, knowing at some point I had to fit in an hour or two of writing.
Not that I didn't spend a lot of time on other activities, though. You may remember the day I sewed an apron, for example. I have a natural aversion to required activity, and even though it was strictly for fun and no one was breathing down my neck, I found myself needing to avoid it and do something unproductive for a while. I think that was okay, though, like I was telling the writing, "I'm in control, and I will take care of you when I need to." Not like pulling an all nighter on some paper that you just end up hating. I think that if I had sat down and made myself write fiction in the way I've previously had to make myself write essays, it would have become an unpleasant experience.
So it was a fascinating experiment in regards to goal-setting (and achieving!), and time management and commitment. And I was very confident about the whole thing, because I didn't necessarily have to worry about the quality of my product--not that that isn't going to matter eventually, but as an exercise in training diligence, the act of writing superseded the need for simultaneous criticism. As in, you write a lot more if you don't spend half your time going back and trying to make every sentence perfect. There's time for editing later.
As for what I learned about writing, the most surprising thing I discovered was how large my story actually was. I've never really written anything substantial before, not something that covers a lot of ground and has a plot and stuff. Mostly what I write when I sit down and write are "one shots;" basically I write scenes and call them stories. But this story, this thing I'm calling "Epoch," is actually a story, following these two characters across years of their lives. But that wasn't even the long part!
Back in the spring, I wrote a scene, a story, about a fight between two people. Intercut between the present tense narrative were past tense flashbacks, each one informing the connection between the two characters, answering the question of why they were fighting, and what the fight meant. Over the summer, I sat on it, edited it a little, and then started seriously thinking about what would happen next.
But before I could think about where those people were going, I had to think about where they came from, or else there would be little emotional impact when you see what their current life is like. Because things used to be great, and then someone made a horrible mistake and now things are awful. Running with my flashback theme, I decided that the following narrative would have chapters that switch off from flashback to current timeline, creating a checkerboard of story lines from the past and the present.
With that in mind, I created an episode from the past to flesh out, as the first "chapter" following the initial story. And then the second chapter would be back in the present, carrying on from the end of the fight. Instead of actually writing this chapter, I thought about it a lot, wanting it to actually be plotted and have a mystery and clues and interlocking pieces, because that's not something I've ever done and it's hard for me to keep track of things like that. But it's the type of storytelling I admire the most--the tightly wound step-by-step plotty type stories. The ones that really come together in the end, and you're equal parts "I knew deep inside that was going to happen" and "I never expected that to happen!!"
So when my sister was all "do NaNoWriMo!!!!" I said, "I have other things I need to be writing." That excuse eventually turned into "I'll just write that thing I have planned, since I should be writing it anyway," with the goal to write 50k new words of the previous idea.
What happened was that plotted story, while surprising easy to slam out 16 hundred words of a day, ended up wrapping up at around 25k words. As in, instead of being the first chapter, it turned out to be half the book. And that's when I realized just how massive this idea was. Simultaneous realizations were: if I had known how much work this would be, I never would have started/if I hadn't just started, I never would have done it. So I'm infinitely indebted to NaNoWriMo for showing me what a real story looks like, even just in the physical page-count sense.
Oh, and the crazy thing, when I finished the "first chapter," and I had to strike out into literally uncharted territory, those first few days into the "second chapter" where fraught with anxiety and the sense of drowning in a deep and endless sea. I didn't know what to write! So I vomited up 1,667 words of pretty much irrelevant nonsense, thinking hard on the next step between times, and in a couple of days I was confident enough in my path to continue on and finish a day early. And I do think that if I didn't have a deadline, a reason to plot quickly, I would have thought and thought and never actually written the next thing until maybe one day I was really bored.
The other thing I learned is that I'm a big-picture story person. The actual act of writing isn't necessarily my favorite thing on earth, I mean. Putting words in order to convey narrative, that's not what I want to do. I don't want to be a novelist. But I want to create story; I want to come up with epic clashes and heartbreaking interpersonal conflicts and and I want this person to say this one thing that changes the world. I want to write, but I don't want to be the one to write it down. I think that's part of why I turned to screenwriting, because the script is not the end product. The script gets turned into something else more than the script, where the story is expressed in performance and lighting and camera movement and musical scoring. In literature, the art is all there on the page, and I don't feel comfortable enough in the crafting of the English language to concentrate on excelling in both content and format.
But yes! I've written a novella amount of words, no small feat! And I will continue to write this story, until it reaches its charted conclusion. And then I will spend a year or two editing it so that I do not offend English-literate people. Then you can read it! If you like vampires and magic-using and girls with swords and stuff. Or if you're a proponent of second chances and an opponent of prejudice, which is what the story is actually shaping up to be about. It's all good.
OKAY. I apologize for talking your ear off about this thing, but this is my formal debriefing on my experience, and it's an experience I'm glad I had. Here's to next November--and Script Frenzy in April! Write 100 pages of screenplay in one month! Yeah. You know I'm there.
Oh, I'll leave you with my playlist for my character's story arc. Maybe you can guess what it's about:
When the Day Met the Night - Panic at the Disco
Princess of the Universe - Queen
Runaway - Linkin Park
Can't Take It - The All-American Rejects
End of the World - Armor for Sleep
The Promised Land - Nobuo Uematsu
Pyramid - Wolfmother
The Show Must Go On - Queen
No Reply - Yoko Kanno
Easier to Run - Linkin Park
What I've Done - Linkin Park
My Suicide Your Homicide - Carter Burwell
Everything Changes - Staind
Leave Out All The Rest - Linkin Park
Savior - Rise Against
This is Not the End - The Bravery
Before It's Too Late - Goo Goo Dolls
The Adventure - Angels and Airwaves
Enjoy!
-Steph
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