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Who’d be a Writer, eh?
Sorry if I’ve been a bit quiet of late. I’ve been somewhat pre-occupied with taking part in National Novel Writing Month which is now just halfway through – and I’m pleased to report I’m also just over halfway through myself.
The idea is relatively simple, to write 50,000 words of a novel between 1st and 30th November. Today I stand at X words which isn’t admittedly a major amount over, but I’m just impressed I even managed to get as far as 50% of the way this early – I was convinced I’d make it to 30,000 only.
It’s an interesting process though. The idea is to write, obviously, but that’s just write. No editing is allowed – that’s what you do in December, apparently, or more likely (in my case) January. During November you just literally have to fill the pages with words. It means that, if the mood takes you, you can just do the fun bits and sort it all out later, but I’m trying to work in a slightly more linear fashion at the moment – not that it has entirely worked out that way given the jumps back and forwards in time.
So far in those words I’ve had one murder (and one attempted), one extra-marital affair, one mugging that isn’t really, a missing boyfriend and a suicide. And that’s without tying the events at two different ends of a decade together or getting to the militant Christians or blowing anything up.
All of that, of course, looks vaguely promising, but I’m also aware of its major failings already. Thankfully the plot is sort of straightening out in my head as I type and kind of works as a whole which is good, but it’s been hard to write some of the more functional “getting A to B” type stuff done, and some of the prose seems horribly clunky (although some of it I really like), and there have been moments when at the end of a long day my brain just didn’t want to do it and the words had to be almost literally wrenched from me.
But it is proving quite a positive experience all told. I thought 50,000 was a lot of words for a novel, but I strongly suspect that the final first draft when I complete it in the future may be nearer 100,000 before I begin to wield a scalpel over it (and boy will I be trimming away).
But yeah, even though I may still miss the target by the end of the month, I’m still feeling quite a sense of achievement. It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for about two years now so it’s nice to finally start seeing it work its way down onto the page. And it also means that my claim on the front page of this very site to have started a novel doesn’t now have to have the whispered qualifier “in my head” on it.
So ultimately it’s made less of a liar of me. And hurrah for that.
Posted on November 15, 2007 | Filed Under Reading and Writing
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