Anything Fictional

Word count: 9,437

Productive day in the end, despite a lot of procrastination through most of the morning and afternoon. God bless public holidays for horse races. Melbourne Cup day is always a saving grace at the beginning of NaNoWriMo.

I didn’t quite make my target of 10,000 words, but I came close enough to be happy. It was made more difficult by a sore back – brought on, embarrassingly, by a fit of sneezing. A trip to the osteopath is booked in for the near future, but not near enough. Earliest convenient appointment was Tuesday next week. I’ll have to see how I go between now and then.

Word count: 6,374

For the end of only Day 2 of NaNoWriMo, I’m very happy with the word count I’ve managed to rack up. It’s a few hundred words shy of the ideal Day 4 word count. It certainly helps that yesterday was a Sunday and I took the day off today to make the most of the Melbourne Cup public holiday tomorrow.

But I’ll be away next weekend, so I want a comfortable word count buffer to make sure I don’t fall behind if I can’t get a lot done while I’m in Sydney. Not to mention that for the rest of the week, every evening is booked up with dinners with friends, and house inspections (there was one of those today as well, but that doesn’t matter so much when have the whole day off).

Ideally, I would like to be at 10,000 words by tomorrow. That way, even if I only do 1,000 words per night for the rest of the week, and nothing over the weekend, I’ll still pretty much be on track come next Monday. Maybe I’ll have to come up with some creative ways to squeeze in a few hundred words here and there over the next week.

It all adds up in the end.

Word count: 3,332

Yep, it’s that time of year again. November: the month of novelling insanity. A race against yourself to a 50,000 word novel.

This is my third year doing NaNoWriMo. In the previous years, I felt like I’ve written decent, yet distinctly first-draft novels that have evolved over the course of the month.

This year, I feel better prepared for what lies ahead. Maybe it’s the experience of past years, but for the most part I feel better prepared because I’ve been outlining my story for the past month.

About 2 months ago, I came across the site Storyfix.com. It’s a blog about writing by US author Larry Brooks. For me, it started with a series of posts he wrote on story structure, and more recently an expanded ebook on the subject. He advocates a strong understanding of story structure if you hold any hope of one day being published. Obviously with such a bold statement, he’s got his decriers, but I’m with him on this one. He takes a lot of his story structure queues from the world of screenwriting, but they are just as applicable to novels. It’s all about story, regardless of the format used to deliver it.

Even if your skeptical or a by-the-seat-of-your-pants writer, I recommend reading his posts on Story Structure. You might be surprised what you learn, and even if you prefer to delve into the writing process without an outline, an understanding of conventional story structure will stand you in good stead for making the right decisions about your story as you proceed.

So as NaNoWriMo starts this year, I feel like I’m much more in control of the story I’m telling. I’m not blindly jumping into writing without knowing where the story is going, how it’s going to change and how it’s going to end. I’ve been making decisions about the major plot points of my latest novel for the past month, and slowly, scene by scene, filling in the outline to move the story from one point to the next.

And far from the writing being a tedious afterthought, I’m excited by this story, maybe moreso than my stories from previous years of NaNoWriMo. I get to focus on writing each scene to the best of my ability. I can focus on the emotion and conflict rather than wondering how this is going to get me to the next scene.

And even just in the first day, I feel like writing this way makes the prospect of 1,667 words per day a much more manageable task.

Final official word count: 50,928!

Yep, still a winner. And now just showcasing the other NaNoWriMo winner badge that they give you when you win.

As much as I was writing a few days ago how I was going to power past 50,000 words, now that it’s the end of the month, I’m just exhausted. Now that the pressure’s off, I’ve fallen in a heap and all I want to do is sleep.

I’m mostly happy with what I’ve written in the past 30 days. I felt like the story was going nowhere in the beginning, but the story really started to flow and be interesting (or at least, I think it is – future readers may have a different opinion though!) towards the end. And it’s a first draft, which typically means its inconsistent, confusing, and melodramatic, and I’m sure my story is all of those things, so hopefully in the next few months I can revise it, explore more of the themes of the story, tighten the plot in places, characterise the people of the story more, and create a more vivid setting. Even though the 50,000 words is done, the hard part is still to come.

I’ve still got a few more scenes to write before the end – possibly about 5000-10000 words – and yes, I know I said the same thing last year and never got around to it, but I’m actually going to do it this time!

Word count: 50,231!

Hooray! I made it to 50,000 words, and one day ahead of schedule! For all the things that have been going on this month – trips to Sydney, watching Ironman competitions, working on weekends, etc, etc – I’m surprised that I made it there at all.

So I’ve become an official NaNoWriMo winner for 2008. Once you hit 50,000 words, there’s a facility on the NaNoWriMo website to paste in the text content of your novel, and they will do an official verification of your word count. Interestingly, the count the website gives you is slightly higher than what you see in MS Word. At the moment, my official word count on NaNoWriMo is 50,497. It’s nice that it’s a little higher that MS Word, instead of lower.

So is that it? No, most definitely not. I’m heading out to dinner tonight, and maybe I’ll do a little bit more later. But I will definitely do some more tomorrow. I have no intention of trying to beat the 60,000+ I did last year, not at this late stage. But last year, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have all the commitments that I did this year, so I’m still very proud of my effort.

One more day to go, and I’ll see if I can’t do another couple of thousand words before the official end of NaNoWriMo…