I'm behind! Why am I always behind? It preys on my mind.
People writing real honest-to-god novels spend years working on them, and I'm sick and tired of my story after a few weeks. This always happens - I realize that I haven't done enough research, that I'm spending too much time babbling about nothing (is it character development to talk about some funny story in the character's childhood? Or a cheap word count trick?) after promising to keep it minimal.
I'm still glad I'm doing it, I will finish my 50,000 words by the end of November, but it's a grind.
People writing real honest-to-god novels spend years working on them, and I'm sick and tired of my story after a few weeks. This always happens - I realize that I haven't done enough research, that I'm spending too much time babbling about nothing (is it character development to talk about some funny story in the character's childhood? Or a cheap word count trick?) after promising to keep it minimal.
I'm still glad I'm doing it, I will finish my 50,000 words by the end of November, but it's a grind.
I've had a really good experience with Nanowrimo.
ReplyDeleteMy normal process is to start a new story with tons of enthusiasm, crank out 20,000 words in a couple of days, then start obsessing over and compulsively editing what I already have until I get completely bogged down and bored of my idea. Then I swap to this other REALLY cool idea,and my story ends up banished to Hard Drive limbo.
Nanowrimo's deadline forced me to just get the story down on paper and not go back and edit...and now that my first draft's finished, the amount of work I've already invested (and the fact it's a FINISHED draft) gives me the motivation to actually get the thing into a readable form.
...and I completely forgot my main point, which is not to worry about it and just keep writing until you get to the end.
ReplyDeleteOnce your first draft is finished, you can decide whether your character's childhood anecdote is necessary to the story or if it needs to be cut. Now is not the time to worry about it.
When I was 15,000 words in I thought I had nowhere near enough story to get to 50,000, so I added a flashback purely to pad my word count. Now that I'm done, that shameless word-count padding has become the backbone to my main character's motivation. It's given him a lot of (MUCH needed) depth and contains my absolute favorite scene in the whole story.
Since starting editing, I've cut around 15,000 words and added nearly 20,000 more and I've barely started... and a lot of my best ideas wouldn't have existed if the fluff I wrote originally wasn't there as a springboard.
That's my favorite part of writing; when your characters come up with ideas of their own and some small, insignificant element you wrote to pad the word count suddenly becomes integral to the story.
In other words, the only thing you should worry about in your first draft is getting from 'Once upon a time' to 'The end'.
The way I see it, plotting your story is doing a concept sketch, your first draft is putting a finished sketch onto the canvas, your second draft is your under-painting and the third is the finished piece (with the right reserved to go back and add or remove some details.)
As you no doubt know, sometimes you need to write 15,000 words that don't work in order to arrive at the 500 that do.
Don't give up now!!!!..... take a day off- don't think about it- and then wake up and finish it this weekend!!!!!
ReplyDeleteDon't worry!! You've still got time, and stories have a tendency to make you get that way. I've decided my story and I aren't speaking right now. It'll be lucky if I speak to it in Jan at this rate. The ending was crap, crap, crap. So it can just sit there and wait. :D
ReplyDeleteGood luck!
Thanks for the encouragement, everyone! It means a lot, and I appreciate it.
ReplyDelete