A Rebuttal

I've read a few articles like this since the beginning of November: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-gresko/national-novel-writing-mo_b_781313.html

If you don't want to read the article, I'll sum up: A number of people find no value in National Novel Writing Month because at the end of the month, people are not left with a quality product. If your aim is to write crap, why do it?

It's not untrue, but it's a shallow way of thinking about the real goal (at least to me).

1) Practice makes perfect

Go on. Draw it.

Even if you know you're not going to sketch a masterpiece, you  might sit in a park and draw that squirrel over there anyway. Sometimes we do things because we like to. Even if (like me) you want to be a professional writer, any chunk of time I designate for writing is good practice for later, and I might end up with something that turns out well.

2) Mad Skills
By the time I heard about NaNoWriMo for the first time, I loved writing, but I had never gotten to the end of a novel. I'd started and thrown away dozens. NaNoWriMo claimed that not only had a few people written 50,000 words in one month, but thousands of people did it every year. As as challenge to myself, I jumped in, convinced it wasn't possible since every idea I'd ever had fizzled after no more than 20,000 words.

"Silence your inner editor," the website said. That made me as uneasy as the wordcount. After finishing the first chapter of a novel, one of my favorite parts was going back and touching it up. But then I kept working on the first chapter and never progressed. So I tried it. I wrote an outline to help with the time restriction, and on November 1st, started with chapter one. I made plenty of mistakes, but decided to plow through and fix it later.

Every writer has a different method for getting things done. What I learned from NaNoWriMo is what works for me, and I might not have figured it out on my own. Though you will not end up with an industry-ready manuscript at the end of the month (I'm still editing the first novel I did in a month), you will learn things, get a lot of practice, establish a writing routine, and (hopefully) have a good time.

Grand total: 120k words; just under 450 pages

Whew!

Well, that's done.  I finished the novel last night after pouring 6,400 words into it yesterday.  That's a lot!  But after all that, all the hard work, pushing through the boring parts ... I think the ending tied together really nicely.  I don't think I've left any loose ends, but I'm sure my test readers will tell me if I did.

Editing is going to be an adventure, though.  Not only have I never written 450 pages of anything before, I've never had to make 450 pages look presentable before!  I guess I'll tell you all about it when I get there.  For now, I'm leaving it alone to marinate in all its awesomeness.

And it's weird what music I got hooked on while composing this little (*cough*) tale.  Lady Gaga and Falco.  Why?  Maybe I went a little nuts toward the end of the novel ... but after a while, I was like, "I've really gotta listen to Bad Romance again!!"  So yeah.  Some crazy pop music lead to my crazy word count.  And now I've gotta come down off it somehow.

Outlines, Audiobooks, and other rambling stuff

The Outline (again)

Yes, I got my outline to 50,000 words (and worked much too hard to make the number exact). It's excessive, and I'm guessing the finished product won't be much longer than that. Although, I've got to add all the dialogue, so that could take up a few thousand more words. I think the story itself is nice and solid now. When I wrote it before, I only got up to 40,000 words, and there were way too many plot gaps for it to be considered good at all. Ask me on December 1st if the monstrous outline was worth it.

Audiobooks

In an effort to keep my brain happily occupied at work while I'm doing things that don't require much thought, I've been looking for something worthwhile to listen to. I found a very good website called LibriVox, which specializes in making public domain (i.e. classic) books available free to the public. Today, I started listening to the German version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the guy who reads it makes me love the German language more than I thought I would (very expressive ... beautiful voice).

Yes, I understand a little German. In listening to this book (got through 3 and a half chapters before I went home), I understood about half of it. It helps a lot that I'm familiar with the story already.

But the website (LibriVox) has mostly English books. I haven't listened to any of the others yet, but I'm looking forward to letting my brain occupy itself with some classics while my hands sort the mail/email at work.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I'd really forgotten how much I enjoyed this story. I've read it 2 or 3 times already, and saw a movie version of it (from 1945). I didn't like that movie because Dorian didn't show any emotions ... I don't think that's an accurate portrayal of the character because even though Dorian became evil, that doesn't necessarily mean he's got a blank face all the time.

I even got to thinking that my current project, Awake, is sci-fi/fantasy in the same way that The Picture of Dorian Gray is sci-fi/fantasy. That is, a tiny plot point is supernatural, and the rest of the story is rooted in reality. I enjoy reading things like that because I don't have to learn a completely new world or alien races, etc. (such as Lord of the Rings -- which I loved, by the way).

Awake is also a mystery in the same way that the TV show Lost is a mystery. There's no "whodunnit" to figure out, just a big "what the heck just happened??" As such, it's extremely difficult to categorize my story. Is it urban fantasy? mystery? literary ... something? Ah, you guys don't know because I'm not giving out any plot details, am I? I like that to be a secret because ... I just do.

I guess genre placement doesn't matter a whole lot, and I'm not worried about it. But when it comes to submission (It'll get to that point probably this time next year once I'm done with the tedious and numerous edits), it helps to pick out who to send it to. Anyway. Doesn't matter. Thanks for reading all this rambling!

This outline is almost a novel by itself

I'm over 34,000 words at the moment on the outline for "Awake". I've said this about previous projects before, but I'm not sure if the length of this outline means I'll have an extremely long novel when I'm finished, or if it means I've just about said everything I can say. We'll see.

The plot has gone past the climax now, and I'm working out how everything winds down to a satisfying ending. Thinking about using an epilogue.

Awake!

Nothing really to report, but I've been having a good time outlining my latest creation. It is called "Awake" (as you can probably tell from the title of this post). So far, the outline is 26,000 words, which is about the length of a novella. This thing is getting crazy.

Submitting Fiction

That time has come again. I've written a novel, edited it, got my mom to read it, got a few friends of mine to say, "I'm too busy to read it, but I promise I will", and now I'm querying literary agents.

I've also taken advantage of NaNoWriMo and CreateSpace's free proof copy offer, so I should be seeing a paperback of The Silent Treatment in the mail in a little while. Even though it's just for me and won't actually be on sale, it's quite exciting. I'll be able to put it on my bookshelf in the "S" section.

<-- like this!

Fif-tee thou-sand! *crash*

Ok, I did it.

ZZzzzzz.....

Word count

Ugh. As you can see, the word count is getting up there for this month. I'm right on track with daily quotas ... usually I can't stop before I reach 2000 words, and I make 3000 a day sometimes. But I'm running into a real problem! My outline is almost finished. I'm on the cusp of the climax and I still have 20,000 more to go. Did I skimp at the beginning? I might have been too excited to get started ...

Stupid?

It's like an addiction. If you'll observe the panel to your right, you'll see that I'm once again going for the 50,000 word mark in February.

That's right. The shortest month. And this month, I have plenty of other stuff to do. But you know, sometimes when you're the busiest, you need the biggest escape. This is it for me. It's also a sequel (or beginning of a series) to the one I did in November. Yay mysteries!

I WON!!

Ahh, so this is what winning feels like ... it's lovely!

In all fairness, I didn't have a job or school to mess with this month, so writing and juggling my "chores" wasn't all that difficult. Even though 50,000 words is still a lot. I think I owe it all to my excellent outline; with a good outline, the novel really does write itself.

Now on to editing ...

My novel :)

This is my novel as it stands right now ... or a graphic depiction of it. Neat, huh?
(obviously, these are just the most used words ...)

Aaand I'm done.

I'm surprised that finishing not only 50,000 words, but also finishing the novel only took 17 days. I'm not going to pretend it's quality work just yet (first draft, you know), but it's a good, solid start. So as the month wears on, I'm going to go back over a few scenes and write them from different perspectives; later on when I do my editing, I'll have lots of stuff to choose from, maybe even push my word count up even further.

I'm also thinking about making this novel into a series ... I sort of got the Nancy Drew bug from it and think my characters would do well in other settings, handling other types of mysteries. We'll see.

WOOHOOO!!!!

I did it in 13 days! 50,025 as of night, and the thing is ... I still have outline left over, so I'm just gonna keep going until the month is finished and see how many words I can rack up.

Ooh... cramped fingers ...

Alright ... so the word count widget is a little slow.

I couldn't help it: I stayed up until midnight last night to get started right away. I got in 600 words then, and another 1600 just now. Things are going well!

Editing again

I may have written the complete text in a month, but it'll take me the rest of the year to edit it into something palatable for another human being to digest. But that's the point of the first draft: just get it onto the page and worry about it later.

What started out as a little over fifty-thousand words has dwindled down to just under forty-thousand. Where did my ten-thousand words go?? Apparently, some fluff got into my text, but I'm sure those ten-thousand will be back as I'm fleshing out stuff like "They all looked afraid" into something a bit more literary. I really can't wait to have some people read it, but it'll probably be a while before it's dressed enough to go out in public.

As I work on my project and do other things, it's so easy for me to liken novel writing to normal every-day things. Like cooking, for example. When I want to make something, I get out the recipe (the outline), drag all the ingredients out of the fridge (the initial scenes). Then, I get rid of the stuff I don't need (plastic bags, inedible greens -- editing). I measure, mix, arrange (polish), and cook. When the finished food product comes out of the oven, it looks nothing like the scattered ingredients on my counter, but those bags and bottles and smatterings of flour were necessary for the finished product.

Word count for January: 50,231!!!

When I first heard about nanowrimo.org's project for getting writers to compose a 50,000 word novel in a single month, I thought it would be impossible. My longest work had barely reached 40,000, and that was after working on it for a year (and consequently scrapping the whole thing).

But after reading the website and seeing how many people actually accomplished their goals, I worked it out that reaching 50,000 words in a month meant writing 1667 words a day. Piece of cake. So instead of waiting until November when the website holds their competition, I decided to start right away with the month of January (call it a new year's resolution). Some days I wrote far more than my goal, some days I couldn't get to it at all - but on January 31st, my last day, I had only 600 words to go.

I liken a first draft to a globule of clay: you want to create a beautiful sculpture, so you first build the armature (the outline/notes), then you cover the whole thing in clay in the generic shape you eventually want it to be in (the first draft). By then, it doesn't look like what you want it to be - definitely not something you want to show to anyone else! But then you edit out the clumps that don't do anything for the story, and you gently and painstakingly sculpt everything that remains into your final product.

My stories go through a "test audience" before I start sending it for publication (usually on my 3rd draft - then I polish it once more after they read it and incorporate any good ideas they give me). Anyone interested in being a test subject for this latest one, let me know.