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It's not NaNoWriMo, but it will have to do
In theory Nanowrimo should be a relatively easy prospect for me this year, as I have easily 50K or more words planned out and ready to go into The Book. With the basic story structure in place I'm no longer gripped by the fear of narrative drift, so even if I churn out bad words, they've a good chance of being relevant if not salvageable or inspiring.
Hell, it's not even my first novel-length manuscript. Every few years I dig out the old brittle printout and try to read my 14/15yo self's words, but I never get far. I have to assume it's bad, mainly because it's so dull I never read enough to establish just how bad it is. I like to think I've grown beyond that particular problem, in no little way due to the superior editing tools I have at my disposal.
But back to Nanowrimo, I'm not keen to place that kind of pressure on myself mainly because I can't predict if I'll have spoons and can't afford to set extra goals with which to disappoint myself. But I don't really need the extra motivation as I've already decided to try and make some kind of progress on The Book every day. Today I discovered something useful: my scene outlines make sense to me, and I was able to convert about half of an important establishing shot into 500 words of prose. It also helps that I'm quite happy reading back my own work (practice helps) and that I'm quite willing to edit myself (practice helps). I'm not remotely suggesting that words tumble fully-formed from my dainty fingertips, but I am long past the point of treating my own work as sacrosanct. Certain types of cringe are par for the course. That said, I'm not immune to flattery ;-)
I learned how to let go somewhere along the line by writing academic essays. One would occasionally find a reference, a quote, a sentence, or a concept that was hard-won and deeply interesting, but it just didn't belong in that essay. The same applies to lectures/talks/presentations. It's easier to squeeze in cool stuff if you're the one setting the agenda, but I prefer to maintain a narrative and if something doesn't want to fit then I listen to it. There are only so many concepts you can squeeze into certain spaces so sometimes perfectly good content just has to go. To lessen the blow I learned to stash orphaned ideas away, and since I've been able to recycle some of these ideas in more appropriate circumstances there's no mourning involved.
Other self-editing and progress marks include codes for "I know it's awful, but there's something important here to be salvaged later in a complete rewrite," "This is a placeholder word/phrase and don't you dare call this finished until you've found something better," and "This section is under probation and had better do a good job of convincing me it should stay on the next round of edits or it's gone baby."
None of this applies to blog posts, which is part of the attraction of blogging :-)
I didn't count how many words of outline were replaced by today's 500 words of prose, so this is the point at which the total wordcount seems no longer attractive as a measure of progress. I still have plenty of scenes to expand from headings, to phrases, to descriptions of events, and thence to their final form, but I don't like the idea of being held to account purely by a single metric. And because my curiosity compelled me at this point to find out, the current word count is: 15,517.
SoNoNaNoWriMo4Me.
Hell, it's not even my first novel-length manuscript. Every few years I dig out the old brittle printout and try to read my 14/15yo self's words, but I never get far. I have to assume it's bad, mainly because it's so dull I never read enough to establish just how bad it is. I like to think I've grown beyond that particular problem, in no little way due to the superior editing tools I have at my disposal.
But back to Nanowrimo, I'm not keen to place that kind of pressure on myself mainly because I can't predict if I'll have spoons and can't afford to set extra goals with which to disappoint myself. But I don't really need the extra motivation as I've already decided to try and make some kind of progress on The Book every day. Today I discovered something useful: my scene outlines make sense to me, and I was able to convert about half of an important establishing shot into 500 words of prose. It also helps that I'm quite happy reading back my own work (practice helps) and that I'm quite willing to edit myself (practice helps). I'm not remotely suggesting that words tumble fully-formed from my dainty fingertips, but I am long past the point of treating my own work as sacrosanct. Certain types of cringe are par for the course. That said, I'm not immune to flattery ;-)
I learned how to let go somewhere along the line by writing academic essays. One would occasionally find a reference, a quote, a sentence, or a concept that was hard-won and deeply interesting, but it just didn't belong in that essay. The same applies to lectures/talks/presentations. It's easier to squeeze in cool stuff if you're the one setting the agenda, but I prefer to maintain a narrative and if something doesn't want to fit then I listen to it. There are only so many concepts you can squeeze into certain spaces so sometimes perfectly good content just has to go. To lessen the blow I learned to stash orphaned ideas away, and since I've been able to recycle some of these ideas in more appropriate circumstances there's no mourning involved.
Other self-editing and progress marks include codes for "I know it's awful, but there's something important here to be salvaged later in a complete rewrite," "This is a placeholder word/phrase and don't you dare call this finished until you've found something better," and "This section is under probation and had better do a good job of convincing me it should stay on the next round of edits or it's gone baby."
None of this applies to blog posts, which is part of the attraction of blogging :-)
I didn't count how many words of outline were replaced by today's 500 words of prose, so this is the point at which the total wordcount seems no longer attractive as a measure of progress. I still have plenty of scenes to expand from headings, to phrases, to descriptions of events, and thence to their final form, but I don't like the idea of being held to account purely by a single metric. And because my curiosity compelled me at this point to find out, the current word count is: 15,517.
SoNoNaNoWriMo4Me.