It’s been radio silence for a couple of weeks here because I was only doing one thing: NaNoWriMo. I am now the proud creator of one shitty first draft! I definitely learned a lot from doing it:
- Lots of writers hate prescriptivist advice, but I can confidently say: Your production curve should not look like this:
Writing 1,667 words a day is a lot for someone with a full-time job. I started off strong but was knocked off course by attending a conference in early November, and I should have worked harder to make it up. The last couple of days were not fun.
- Word 2008 for Mac sucks. What do you mean, you can't spellcheck anymore once I get up to about 35 pages?
- I'm much more comfortable with writing novels than short stories. I always assumed that one had to master the short story before moving on, and so I really took notice when a couple of writers (I think, Kate Elliott) said that wasn't the case.
- I'm a plotter, not a pantser (not news), and plotting is hard for me (also not news). I love world-building and characterization, but I struggle to figure out what happens next. (This is probably why writing fan fiction has never appealed to me - it seems to be skipping over the fun part.) That said, once I reached a certain point, the plot started to figure itself out. My plot outline only went so far, and then characters started surprising me (there wasn't going to be a sex scene, and certainly not with a character I didn't plan on even existing). I was actually writing to find out what happened next, which I had never experienced before.
- Is it good? Of course not: It's a shitty first draft. What I don't know is whether revision will turn it into a decent novel ... or a shitty tenth draft. But it's DONE. DID I MENTION IT WAS DONE?
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