NaNoWriMo: Day Six
Well, in good news, I've hit 11,000 words a day early (whoo!) but in not-so-great news, I've now come to a point twice where I realized that the way I was writing wasn't working. The idea is still good (to me, at least) but at the end of the month, I'm going to have to do a loooooooot of editing.
Of course, once you get to the point where you figure out that the style isn't working, there's the dilemma of whether to go back and edit right away, thereby possibly losing the progress you've made and ending up with negative net words, or to just change styles in the middle of the piece. I chose the latter. I'm not sure yet how well it's working, if at all; I only did this yesterday. Today brought its own challenge of working in stuff I'd written before, for the same project in its infancy. Things were very different - characters had a different feel to them, and the entire thing is much, much darker now.
At the beginning of the month, I wasn't sure how this first week or so was going to pan out. My previous experience with NaNoWriMo was more of an incentive to finish something I'd started a couple years previously, and while I didn't complete it during that time (it's still in editing), I did manage to crank out 50,000 words and make some major progress. I'm finding the writing process for "Tangle" to be very different. Instead of pursuing quality, all I'm going for is quantity - get the words on the page and fix them later. It was scary at first, because I know I have a strong tendency to self-edit as I'm writing (this post in particular is very scattered for me and my style because I'm trying to let my blog posts be more flow of consciousness) and it's still a challenge. I write something and immediately I want to go back and change this word, add a comma, adjust the tense of that verb. But I'm not letting myself, and it's only slightly excruciating.
I sincerely hope you're not reading this and thinking I'm a pretentious butthole. My intent in blogging about my NaNoWriMo experience is mostly to describe my own writing process, partially for myself, so that I can look back at the end of the month and not only have 50,000 words of story but also my own story of how I got there. Ugh that was so cliché. But really, though - reading the stuff I've written at different points in my life is always interesting, to see where my head was at and how the type of books I was reading at the time influenced my style. What I'm saying is, I doubt you're finding this as interesting as I will in a couple weeks, but I appreciate you reading this.
Of course, once you get to the point where you figure out that the style isn't working, there's the dilemma of whether to go back and edit right away, thereby possibly losing the progress you've made and ending up with negative net words, or to just change styles in the middle of the piece. I chose the latter. I'm not sure yet how well it's working, if at all; I only did this yesterday. Today brought its own challenge of working in stuff I'd written before, for the same project in its infancy. Things were very different - characters had a different feel to them, and the entire thing is much, much darker now.
At the beginning of the month, I wasn't sure how this first week or so was going to pan out. My previous experience with NaNoWriMo was more of an incentive to finish something I'd started a couple years previously, and while I didn't complete it during that time (it's still in editing), I did manage to crank out 50,000 words and make some major progress. I'm finding the writing process for "Tangle" to be very different. Instead of pursuing quality, all I'm going for is quantity - get the words on the page and fix them later. It was scary at first, because I know I have a strong tendency to self-edit as I'm writing (this post in particular is very scattered for me and my style because I'm trying to let my blog posts be more flow of consciousness) and it's still a challenge. I write something and immediately I want to go back and change this word, add a comma, adjust the tense of that verb. But I'm not letting myself, and it's only slightly excruciating.
I sincerely hope you're not reading this and thinking I'm a pretentious butthole. My intent in blogging about my NaNoWriMo experience is mostly to describe my own writing process, partially for myself, so that I can look back at the end of the month and not only have 50,000 words of story but also my own story of how I got there. Ugh that was so cliché. But really, though - reading the stuff I've written at different points in my life is always interesting, to see where my head was at and how the type of books I was reading at the time influenced my style. What I'm saying is, I doubt you're finding this as interesting as I will in a couple weeks, but I appreciate you reading this.
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