It’s Day 6 of NaNoWriMo, and I’m now at around 5700 words. A little behind in terms of reaching the 50,000 word goal but I’m okay with that. My own personal goal is to take the time to sit down and write a part of my novel - anything - every single day this month.
But even in this short space of time, I’ve learned a lot about my own writing.
- I never realized this before, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist during the drafting process. It’s only now, when my focus is on my word count, that I’m really seeing this. I expect my words to be near perfect as I’m writing them, and when something doesn’t sound right, there’s a very strong urge to stop writing and start editing.
- For this particular novel, I don’t know some of my characters well enough. Especially one of my main characters - I’m realizing he’s more of a cardboard-y character when compared with some of my other characters. I haven’t done enough on the character front, so I’ll have to find some time to work more on just the character profiles.
- Having one wooden character has been hurting all of the dialogue scenes I have where that character is involved.
- The more I practice just pressing on, skipping over bumps and obstacles, the easier it does get to keep on writing. As long as I keep telling myself, I’m going to go back over everything anyway, I can keep writing. My suspicion is that at the end of November, what I’ll have is a plumped out “outline” of my book that I’ll then be able to fill out into a novel.
The process has been enlightening so far, and I’m feeling very hopeful. My problem with writing has always been completion - if the NaNoWriMo method works for me, I will likely continue using it: set a goal to write out the entire book at a breathless pace, without worrying about various problems that crop up, and then go back and edit, even rewrite if necessary. Getting to completion, even if it’s a 50,000 word extremely plump “outline”, will be exciting enough on its own.
Another reason I’ve been able to just gallop ahead, ignoring all the obstacles in my way, is because of the “scenes method”, using Liquid Story Binder, that I picked up from my friend Ann-Kat. She’s actually written a tutorial on how she’s using LSB to work on her novel for NaNoWriMo - this is more or less what I’ve been doing, and it works. I was lucky enough to pick up LSB a while back when it was on Giveaway of the Day; I find that it’s organic and flexible enough for me to use without feeling restricted into a set process.
You can get Liquid Story Binder for a 30-day free trial, and doing NaNoWriMo with it will be more than enough to let you get a feel for the software and put it through its paces. If you’re already using LSB, check out Ann-Kat’s tutorial - her scenes method is basically a very flexible way of sort-of-outlining your book, so that you get the best of both worlds: absolute flexibility but a little bit of a map.
