It
took longer this NaNoWriMo to complete my manuscript than it had with
others. I can finish a manuscript in anywhere from 7 to 21 days. This
one I finished on Sunday the 23rd
of April. I had worked on this about two hours a day, an hour in the
mornings and another hour in the evenings. I had never split up
writing time before, and I found it to be a good way to work. In an
hour I can usually write about 1,500 words, sometimes a little more
if I don’t have to think too much.
The
other thing splitting up the time did was that it gave me a few hours
to think of the next move. I also thought a great deal about Astoria,
Oregon. We had been there for several days back in March. We did all
the things I wanted to do. It was fun to introduce Lucian to coastal
life. While were there, I found the places I would use in my story.
I
also recorded some of the events we experienced as experiences for my
characters.
What
I really wanted was a story about a middle aged guy who is on the
cusp of change. I wanted him to reconcile his past, make good with
his current situation. I wanted him to find peace. In the original
story, his wife leaves him and it’s a story about him and his
daughter. In a way, my original story was a riff off of John
Steinbeck’s The
Winter of Our Discontent
and I wanted to move away from that.
No,
my conflict got darker and darker, just the way I like it. But what
it really met was that I went to Astoria during the third week of
March for a vacation with my family and I stayed there for an extra three, four weeks writing about it.
The
Cataract
rewrite proved to be a success. Now, I felt like the original story
was a success too. It’s the difference of 22 years and near as many
novels written in that time. Writing novels, like anything, it gets
easier and more fluid with more practice.
I
love the NaNoWriMo stats page. Every day of the challenge and
sometimes more than once in the day, when I updated my word count, I
got to see the graphs and charts change. It’s nice to write 1,500
words in a sitting and then see that it comes to 3% of the over all
goal.
Word
count matters.
I’ve
had artists friends over the years that find the idea of word count
funny. How can you quantify art? They ask these sorts of questions.
When you’re a writer, word count does matter. If you set yourself out
to write a novel, I think 50,000 words is a great goal. It means that
you have to have a beginning, a middle and an end and all of it is
built into that word count. Knowing I wanted to get to 50,000 words,
I knew exactly when the first act of the story ends, where the the
second act ends and how to fit the end in. Having a word count, at
least for me, helps give me structure.
The
best thing about the NaNoWriMo site happens when you put in the word
count that reaches your goal. Here’s what they gave me this year:
