What I've Learned from NaNoWriMo

So I've finished NaNoWriMo early, I had written my 50000 words by midmorning today. It felt like a real achievement! It's been hard work but I've been lucky to have had plenty of time to work on this and was determined from the start to try to finish early. So what have I learnt from the experience?

a) Although to date I have mostly written haiku, short poems and flash fiction, I have proven now that I can at least write enough words for a much bigger piece of work.

b) Just writing with the aim of reaching a given total word count is liberating, as it means you just write without worrying about the quality.

c) at the same time just writing like that means that I didn't get stuck on polishing the first paragraph to perfection only to find myself left with nothing to add to the one perfect paragraph (having said that, the first paragraph is probably the best paragraph in the novel!).

d) but oh, this isn't a novel. Not at all. It's a very rough first draft, which, with a lot of editing and polishing, may one day resemble something like a real novel that people might want to read. (So that's what I'll be doing over the next year or so!)

e) It's useful just to write through the plot dilemmas, in this draft I have characters talking about where they want the plot to go, at one point a character actually says she wishes the author could sort out a particular aspect of the plot (hang on a minute, maybe I should keep that! It could be a nice post-modernist twist to the novel!?)

f) I had always thought that I would find research so tedious it would put me off ever writing a novel but in fact I really enjoyed the research aspect. I think it would be more tedious for me if it was historic research where you need to get all the facts as accurate as possible. Given that my novel is speculative fiction set in the far future then I have a lot more freedom to do what I want with my research. (I've had great fun with extrapolating some elements of the contemporary world into the future!)

So now I'm going to catch up on all the research information I identified but never got the chance to read properly then I'll start looking at the 'novel' in a few weeks time and get it into some kind of decent shape.

And I won't keep talking about it, promise!

How was NaNoWriMo for you?

Hopeful Dystopia?

The novel I'm writing for NaNoWriMo is set in a future independent Scotland which has lost a lot of land to rising sea-levels, is recovering from a long war and is just welcoming thousands of climate change refugees into the country.

This is quite a dystopian view of the future Scotland, but I'm aiming to make the book ultimately hopeful. I really think that we need visions of hope for the future. Whether I can weave those visions successfully into a dystopic scenario, remains to be seen!

I've written a total of 12 353 words as I post this. I'm aiming for at least another 500 before the end of the day.

More NaNoWriMo

So my main character doesn't seem to want to be the main character any more, but that's fine because there's someone else who will make a better main character (and I don't mean the bunny!). The original main character is also refusing to fall for the person I had expected her to end up marrying! She knows her own mind! 3366 words so far today making a total of 9 473. I may leave it there until tomorrow...

NaNoWriMo update

I started my novel today! I've spent all morning on it so far and have written 2 551 words (the daily target is 1 667 to get to 50 000 by the end of November). I don't want to become boring about NaNoWriMo, nor do I want to give away too much about the plot of my novel, but I will post occasional updates here and on Facebook. I'm also thinking of sharing links that have been useful in my research over on Twitter.

So far the narrative is flowing reasonably well, some of my characters are developing well and i have a reasonably good feeling about the whole thing!

Any other NaNoWriMo people feel free to share your experiences in the comments below!

As ever, coloured text contains hyperlinks which take you to other websites where you can find out more....

NaNoWriMo

I was thinking about an idea for a short story, which was getting quite complicated and then I realised it is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November! So I thought, hey, why not? and signed up. So I'm currently plotting and planning my way to a novel, which will be about climate change in a future independent and fractured Scotland. The aim is to get a 50,000 word first draft completed by the end of November. As someone whose favourite literary forms are haiku and flash fiction this will be a fun challenge! Anyone else signed up for NaNo this year?