How it Started vs. How it’s Going
I set a goal for November, for National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo), like thousands of you beautiful writers out there. I wanted to finish a first draft of my work in progress. I knew my novel was a messy pile of scenes that only loosely connected and primarily only in my mind. I set about trying to form a map from the various cairns scattered across the page. And in that respect, I succeeded. But, no, I did not come out of the month with a first draft.
The Great #NaNoWriMo Heist in practice
What happened? Well, frankly, a mid-November midnight epiphany threw a wrench into any forward momentum I had to finish the book in a month. I’d been writing it in the third person POV, but an itchy thought developed that first person POV would make the story more intimate. Since it’s a revenge story, that intimacy is necessary to make the hero’s villainous conduct more acceptable, in theory. Also, with first person POV I could hide things—both from the reader and my main character—more easily. Events, connections, details, etc., that could be revealed later to build tension and surprise and all the good stuff that good stories contain. I gave it a shot on the first chapter and was immediately converted. Diving into my protagonist’s mind felt as cold and crisp as the Pacific Ocean in early spring. It was like I finally came down from my divine pedestal and bothered to introduce myself.
“Hello dear, I’m your author. Nice to meet you. Now tell me what you want.”
Thus, I spent most of the month re-writing the scenes I already had into first person—which, unfortunately, involves more than executing “Find and Replace” with my protagonist’s pronouns and related verbs. It was a good exercise to go back over the scenes I had already written, now armed with my big picture idea of the plot.
The index card plotting ended up directly affecting my word count as well. I discovered that I had two chapters that pretty much accomplished the same goal. Responsibly, I consolidated them, but it effectively meant chopping out over half an already written chapter.
All those good setbacks would have been surmountable if I’d just adjusted my word count goal and written more each day. But as it happens, I didn’t do that. I blame my day job and also a shabby case of the human condition known as laziness. One thing I certainly did not do is finish the book.
Word count on November 1st: 28,762
Word count on November 30th: 31,908
By the numbers, I failed. It was very two steps forward, two steps back. But the words are better now. On net, I feel nothing.
How’s it going for you?
