NaNoWriMo update

As of this morning, my NaNoWriMo project is up to 18,714 words—that’s 64 pages. Writing that many pages in just over a week is a pretty amazing feat for me, so I’m excited.

The most interesting part of this process has been the routine. Every morning I write a scene or two, usually totaling a little over 1,000 words. Since the goal of reaching 50,000 words in a month translates to 1,667 per day, I’m sometimes doing a second session of about 1,000 words later on in the day. So far I’ve manged to stay ahead.

I’m mostly writing these scenes longhand and then tweaking them as I type them up. This is common for me… at some point in the past few years I started writing longhand for most of my new work. Sometimes I shift to the computer if I’m really on a roll, but I find that when I’m writing by hand in a notebook I’m less likely to get hung up on whether or not it’s “good” or “on the right track” or whatever and instead just keep writing until I hit a good stopping point.

Although I didn’t spend any time planning this story out and honestly don’t know where it’s going, some of the structural tricks I’ve picked up in novel writing workshops are manifesting in interesting ways. For example, one trick I’ve learned is that a big event should happen somewhere around page 50. I thought I knew ahead of time what it was going to be, but I realized when I was only about ten pages away that the story wasn’t moving in that direction and I didn’t have enough space to get to what I thought that event would be, so I just kept writing and figured I’d see where the story took me. And, lo and behold, on page 44 something completely unexpected yet equally “big” occurred. That was neat, and very satisfying.

My concern—which I’m trying to let go of by pushing on with the daily writing—is that I’m not really being hit with huge passionate bursts of creativity. It’s all very methodical, writing in the morning because I know I’m supposed to, but not always wanting to. I think this is a necessary part of being a full-time writer, so I’m willing to go with it, but I don’t know if it means that finished piece will be a stinking pile of crap. Of course, many first drafts are stinking piles of crap even if the writer is passionately in love with the project, and I know that if I decide to keep working on this novel after NaNoWriMo ends, I’m going to have a lot of rewriting ahead of me no matter what. By constantly reminding myself of this, I’ve (mostly) been able to stop worrying about quality and instead focus on discovering the story and getting the words out.

In fact, that’s the most liberating aspect of this experiment—letting go of all the anxiety associated with “getting it right.” I don’t usually write fiction from the beginning through to the end. I come up with random scenes and try to figure out where they fit; I riff and meander and stumble upon gold I wasn’t expecting; I get blocked and obsess over how I don’t know what story I’m trying to tell. I usually feel like the novel is its own entity, existing in some alternate universe in an already perfect, finished form, and I have the insurmountable task of uncovering it. There’s always a fear, however irrational, that I’m somehow going to mess it up in ways too massive to fix.

With this project, I really feel like I’m creating it out of nothing, and I get to decide where it’s going to go. If I weren’t participating in NaNoWriMo, I’d probably still be dithering over the opening scenes, trying to figure out what characters look like and where they grew up and what their neuroses might be. But instead I’m content to leave those details for later. Right now, I just need to get to the end.