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Day 15 (We're Halfway There!)
By Dr. M Leona Godin with Alex Carrigan and Jody Rathgeb
QuailBellMagazine.com
"You have reached the 25,000-word mark, the halfway point, the word-domination, creation application, epic celebration station!"
That was the message I received in my mailbox immediately after posting my word count update at the NaNoWriMo website. Those guys are quick with the kudos! For those writers out there who have never heard of the 50,000 word writing challenge that is NaNoWriMo, let me first direct you to the website NaNoWriMo.org, where they offer plenty of encouragement as well as a place to register your novel and update your word count. Although NaNoWriMo was founded in my hometown of San Francisco back in 1999, I hadn't heard about it until this October and had just a couple of weeks to decide if I would participate and with what writing project. Since I'd had an idea for a science fiction spy novel in my head for a while, but had been putting it off in deference to more manageable short stories and fear of spectacular failure, I decided that I might as well spend a month of my life figuring out whether or not it was worthwhile. In order to win, i.e. write 50,000 words in 30 days, you must write an average of 1667 words a day, which is not really that much when you think about it. Amazing how it grows when you do it, but of course, the opposite is also true. If you do not write for ten days, you have not written 16,670 words and that's quite a lot to miss out on! There is really no incentive for cheating since there is no limit on winners. You are your own prison guard, and so the problem is not how to escape, but rather how to stay locked in to a promise to yourself. Not far into November I began to worry about some potential mid-month hazards, so I decided to ask a couple of fellow Quail Bell contributors with previous NaNoWriMo experience to help me push through... Jody Rathgeb participated four years ago in response to the second novel heebie-jeebies, "My first novel was due out at the end of November, but a second—which I’d been playing at for three years—was not getting anywhere. I’d been writing short stories and placing some, but believed I needed to get moving on Novel #2 before I became a one non-hit wonder." Another Quail Beller, Alex Carrigan, has attempted NaNoWriMo four years running, "Of the last three years, I hit 50K the first time, although I soon found the idea worked better as a graphic novel instead of a book, so I ended up leaving it unfinished. The next two years, I gave up partway through, one because I got sick and completely slipped, and the other because I came to dislike my idea." The mid-month danger, I find from my own experience and others, is to keep it up after the bloom is off the rose of your initial idea. I feel like what I had in mind to write this month has morphed suddenly into something else. Some of the chapters I'd outlined were rubbish and I skipped them, so that now I find myself in the position of either writing a second part that I'd not planned on or writing other things entirely. These mid-month alterations and augmentations to the project are it seems par for the course. Here's Jody on what happened to her plot over the course of the month, "All that forward motion brought in some odd plot ideas. I had Rebecca go on tour with her Trinidadian grandfather’s steel drum band; I gave her a miscarriage; I gave her father an affair; I gave her a white West End boyfriend; I sent her to the art museum and the James River plantations; I married her off and moved her to Fredericksburg. A lot of this had little to do with the basic story. My husband, who was reading none of this, remained baffled the entire month, as I would say things at breakfast such as, 'Well, it looks like I’m going to have to kill off grandma.'" Despite her protagonist's exhaustively dynamic life, Jody finally had to say enough, and resorted to plumping up her word count by starting another short story, "just so I could complete the assignment NaNoWriMo had given me." I can relate since I'm about to sketch out the final scene of operation second Sight and have about 20,000 words to go. Quite a bit of NaNoWriMo flotsam and jetsam floating out on the internet distinguishes between plotters and pantsers, that is, between those who plot out their novels and those who fly by the seat of their pants. It looks like, despite my best intentions, I will have to shift from being the former to the latter because, although I had a chapter outline, it has run dry. Writing 50,000 words in a month gives an obsessive-compulsive writer such as myself—I've been known to spend a month or two editing a short story—a new kind of motivation. It's nice to have the feeling each morning that if I just write 1667 words, I will have a whole lot to edit, whether they be short stories or a novel, I look forward to never running out of stuff to work with. In addition, I've found that I can get the 1667 words cranked out by nine in the morning and have the rest of the day to perform writerly activities, such as editing and submitting, or go about my other business with a light heart. The realization that so much can be written and that writer's block is not even allowed to be an issue is liberating. Alex puts it this way: "It's good because I feel motivated to write and I'm constantly reminding myself to write daily. I don't know if the writing I'm doing is exceptional, but I do like the notion of trying to get as much written out as possible and then being able to go back later and flesh it out. It's largely unchanged from how it felt the first year I attempted the challenge, so I think it's a model I can keep up with." As I wrote in Why Do NaNoWriMo the day before the first day of NaNoWriMo (AKA Halloween!), there are many subtle roadblocks facing a writer's intention to write. Some are individual and particular, others general and universal, but I would argue that there is nothing more demoralizing than the days of not writing that so easily and devastatingly pile up at the foot of a writer. "Aside from wanting to continue with the challenge, I really haven't been that creative lately. I haven't done a lot of writing since August and I've been feeling stifled. I hope that taking on this project and completing it will give me the energy to continue to be creative and finally make an effort to produce more publishable work," says Alex who, as of Friday November 13th hit 28,451 words. Productivity is the name of the game! Although the creature you produce over the course of November might not look very much like the beautiful brainchild you'd imagined in October, the fact of its new and miraculous birth cannot be denied. As Jody concludes regarding the result of her NaNoWriMo project, "I started slashing. The aunt and uncle in Norfolk became just a mention. I took out Thanksgiving and the Trinidadian grandfather, even though I loved him and his cronies. The mentor Shawna was out, along with Dad’s affair, the miscarriage and the wedding. I kept the white boyfriend, though, and the funeral. When all this death and destruction was done, I was left with A Dose of Spirits, a novella of about 20,000 words...And Novel #2? Still unwritten. Nevertheless, I think NaNoWriMo was worth it …for the jump-start, for the discipline, for the fun of it and for a novella I kind of like, even if no one else ever reads it." As for myself, halfway through the novel-writing month and all the way through my novel outline, I am also not sorry. I might still be wondering whether Operation Second Sight should be a novel or a novella, a short story or garbage, if I'd not participated in NaNoWriMo, but I'd have a lot less information to go on. I'm one of those people whose road to procrastination is paved with a thousand great ideas! Now one of those great ideas has weight and substance. It has been reified and can be wrangled or perhaps ultimately dismissed, but it exists and for that I am grateful. I hope that if I keep production at this 50K monthly quota, I will, in the future, be haunted by less idea ghosts!
#Real #NaNoWriMo #HalfwayPoint #Support #WriterEmpathy
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Comments
Alex Carrigan
11/16/2015 11:47:56 am
Now you just got to check back in on December 1st to see how it all turned out. Comments are closed.
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