Anything Fictional

Word count: 38,407.

Now that I’m back on track with my word count, there’s temptation to slack off a little. Knowing that I only need to do 1700 words a day and I’ll get to 50,000 words easily is making me a little complacent I think. Or at least a little distracted.

Maria and I went to a friends 30th birthday party for a BBQ today, so i didn’t get a chance to write through most of the day, but then when I did sit down to write, I kept finding my focus being pulled away to other things. I thought that doing 1700 words would be easy, but what should have taken only 1.5 – 2 hours had taken me the most part of the evening. It would certainly be easier if I just get the writing done, then I can get distracted with whatever I like without feeling guilty.

I had an interesting conversation today with a friend, Pete, who is a builder. He was asking how the writing was going, and I was telling him how last night I’d sat down and written out all the scenes I want to write, starting from the very last scene, then working out the scene before it, then the scene before that, etc until I’d reached the point in the story where I currently was. He said that approach was very similar in many ways to building a house. He said that in building, you design from the roof down, but build from the ground up. It makes sense that if you didn’t give any thought to the roof as you were building the rest of the house, you might end up with a structure that couldn’t support the roof’s weight. But once you’d designed with that goal, you had to lay all the foundations and build from the ground up.

I thought that was a really neat analogy for what I’d done with laying at the scenes…

Word count: 36,704.

Yes, that’s right! More than 4,000 words written today! I’m so stoked about that! I’m now officially back on track for reaching 50,000. In fact, a little ahead now! I could get to the target by Nov 30th with the daily average of 1,667 words.

But screw that! I’ve come this far, I’ll have to see now if I can get past 50,000!

Ok, so anyone noting the time that I’m writing this – 2:14am – will probably say that I didn’t do all 4,000 in one day … but I haven’t gone to bed yet, so I’m counting it all towards day 22. Not that it really matters anyway.

Probably the most impressive thing about this word count is that I didn’t really start writing until about 4:30pm this afternoon. I worked half the day, didn’t get home till about 3pm, and there was a lot of fart-arsing about and procrastinating before I actually sat down and put finger to keyboard.

And the other thing that I managed to squeeze into that time – around 7pm when I was having dinner, was I sat down and planned out the rest of the scenes that lead up to the end of the book. It seems to flow well, and there’s are a few interesting twists in there that I wasn’t really expecting …. or in some case, wasn’t expecting I could work out how to fit them in.

So already, I’ve completed two of the scenes I planned to do, scratched one because my protagonist decided he didn’t want to do that, and wrote another unexpected one to create a bit of conflict and explore some additional themes of the story … not a bad friggin’ day of writing at all!

Word count: 32,610.

It’s been another one of those days where I haven’t found a great deal of time to write. But I did something … about 600 words. It’s good to know that when time is short I can be happy with doing the little that I have time for.

Today – being Friday – was work as normal, but a relatively busy day. Found out that I was going to have to work tomorrow too – at first I wasn’t that happy with that because Saturday and Sunday were going to be my writing days, but I negotiated to get next Friday off if I came in this weekend. So though I’m having to work tomorrow, I can finish NaNoWriMo with 3 straight days off.

The reason that I didn’t get much writing done tonight was because I went along to see the Rocky Horror Show. I’d organised it a few weeks ago with my sister Jenny and my partner Maria. It wasn’t the most fantastic story – it could be confusing and hard to follow at times, not really knowing who certain characters were – but the whole story is framed as schlock science fiction, so you can forgive a few jumps of reasoning here and there. But overall, it just a fun show to watch. The characters were interesting, the songs were lively and the cast just looked like they were having a fantastic time on stage.

I didn’t get home from there until about 10:30pm. I decided that instead of just letting the day go by without doing anything on my story, I’d aim just to do a few hundred words. It only took me about 40 minutes to do 600, so now I can go to bed and be happy that I’ve made some progress…

Word count: 32,052.

Writing over the past few days has been going really well. I’ve found the scenes I’ve been writing more interesting than what’s come earlier in the book. The scenes are tighter, tend not to wander along tangents for the sake of bloating the word count (even though that really is the goal this month).

I’ve had a few really interesting ideas so far of how to lead into the ending of the novel. I’ve always had a vague idea of how it was going to end, but it’s one of the fascinating things of writing a first draft: sometimes you write something, it might just be a throw away line of description, but it’ll be something where you just go “Oh, I can make use of that little bit of information later.”

And that’s the thing that can be really fun – when it’s the little details that provide the solution to the hero’s problem right at the climax of the story. It reminds me of “The Fifth Element” – it’s only about a third of the way through the story where Bruce Willis’ character is lights a cigarette and you notice a single match left in the packet. And then it’s that match that provides the solution to opening one of the rocks in the climax. For the reader, it’s a kind of “a ha, that’s what that was about.” Devices like that are always much more fun for the reader than the “Deus Ex Machina” – the God from the machine – that swoops out of nowhere at the last moment to resolve the story’s conflict.

Word count: 30,010.

I had a single goal with my writing tonight, and that was to get to 30,000 before I went to bed. And I can sleep well now, but I achieved it! Yay!

It’s great looking at that word count and knowing that there is the distance to go is less than the distance that I’ve come so far! It seems achievable, which can’t be a good thing. Going by the average of 1667 words/day there is to do to get to 50,000 in 30 days, I’m only a day behind now, which should be fairly easy to catch up on the weekend. Though I may have Friday’s count to catch up on as well – I’m heading to see the Rocky Horror Show on Friday night with Maria, my sister and her friend, so writing won’t happen until late in the evening, if at all.

But having NaNoWriMo finish on a weekend this year is fantastic! It means that I can have one last ditch effort to get to 50,000 if I’m lagging. I’m definitely going to be selfish and shut the world away that weekend…