30 days 50,077 words
I haven't written any fiction since the eleventh grade when I wrote a story for my high school literary magazine. It wasn't a particularly good story but the teacher wanted to put it in because it wasn't quite as sad as most of the work submitted. In the back of my mind I've always carried a notion that one day I would write a book. I imagined holing up for months in a cabin in the woods of Maine, or an old stone house somewhere in England to write by a warm fire. However; things so seldom turn out the way they are imagined. On the thirtieth of October a friend posted on Facebook that she was signing up for National Novel Writing Month and looking for other writers to join in the challenge. Writing fifty thousand words in thirty days while sitting at home is far from my imagined literary paradise but if I was going to ever write anything I had to start somewhere. And just a few weeks before, inspired by a Xena episode, a friend and I had been talking about an idea for a play that could easily be translated into a novel. So I signed up on the NaNoWriMo website which provides the user with pep talks, writing tips, discussion forums and nifty charts of your progress. On November first I woke up, made a pot of coffee, opened my laptop and started typing.
In order to write 50,000 words in one month you have to average 1,667 words a day, every day. That's about three pages in twelve point font in Microsoft Word. The first day I wrote over 2,000 words. Knowing myself as well as I do I knew I would have to stay ahead of the game if I was going to complete the project. The first couple of days the words piled up fairly easily as I set the stage for my story. It took a lot of brain power, more than I expected. I had to think a lot about my main character, Peter, what would he do each day, who were his friends, what interests did he have, how would he interact with people, where was he etc. etc. A lot of things I've never thought about before in any formal way. In my novel Peter is looking for a job and the gods of Mount Olympus are looking to hire someone to issue the last judgment for dead souls. The book is two stories intertwined, that of Peter, and that of Zeus. Which meant if I got bored of writing about Peter, I could switch to writing about Mount Olympus which I found to be the more creative story.
For thirty days I wrote every day, my worst day I wrote less than five hundred words, on the last day I wrote over four thousand. It was exhausting. Every spare few minutes in the day I would try to pound out a few hundred words. If I wasn't actually writing the novel I was thinking about it every hour of the day. The story completely filled my brain, everything I did could be potential inspiration for a scene - I went jogging, maybe my character goes jogging. I didn't read anything else last month, I didn't watch much TV. I did get out, hiking, running, meeting up with friends, and took three days off for camping around Thanksgiving. I was thinking or talking about my novel, pretty much all the time. There wasn't any time to be unproductive. To get to fifty thousand words, I had to be wordy, whereas I usually pride myself on the conciseness of my writing. I noticed even the e-mails I wrote were getting longer.
The second and third weeks were hard, I didn't want to rush the story along, so I spent a lot of time describing settings and characters. I would write in excruciating detail about how Peter went about making dinner, or what Zeus' office looked like. Though many of these scenes I wrote because I couldn't think of anything to write they added a lot of depth to the characters. I tried when I remembered to instill emotions and strong character traits but character development is something I really need to work at.
The last week of writing came easily. I was used to spending hours a day writing. Often I broke the word count into blocks, four sessions of five hundred words and I would have two thousand words for the day. As the story was ending I felt sad, I knew I would miss my characters and the love hate relationship I had with the novel. Then on November 28 I hit 50,077 words. I was done, many of the last thousand words were back story, filling out earlier sections so when I was done, I didn't have any story left to tell. I closed up my laptop and didn't open it for a week. My brain went empty, I couldn't think about my novel, even when I tried. I wanted to think about editing, about parts I could expand on or delete but somehow the novel was gone from my brain.
Then last night I was at a meeting at an office which was a large part of the setting of my novel and it all came back in a flood. Suddenly all I could think about was the novel again, though I was supposed to be focusing on the meeting at hand. I printed it out last night and started reading it for the first time. Printed out at eighty pages the weight of the task really hit me, this was a piece of work. I read the first couple of pages, it's not badly written, it's sort of boring but maybe it gets better later on. As part of winning NaNoWriMo each writer gets one free proof copy of her book from a publisher. I'm excited about having a book with my name on it on my shelf, it definitely needs some editing, and I have to break it into paragraphs and chapters. As my first novel I don't expect it to be perfect, it is far far longer than anything I have ever written in my life. I found last month that I have 50,000 words in me and that I could get them out in thirty days.
In order to write 50,000 words in one month you have to average 1,667 words a day, every day. That's about three pages in twelve point font in Microsoft Word. The first day I wrote over 2,000 words. Knowing myself as well as I do I knew I would have to stay ahead of the game if I was going to complete the project. The first couple of days the words piled up fairly easily as I set the stage for my story. It took a lot of brain power, more than I expected. I had to think a lot about my main character, Peter, what would he do each day, who were his friends, what interests did he have, how would he interact with people, where was he etc. etc. A lot of things I've never thought about before in any formal way. In my novel Peter is looking for a job and the gods of Mount Olympus are looking to hire someone to issue the last judgment for dead souls. The book is two stories intertwined, that of Peter, and that of Zeus. Which meant if I got bored of writing about Peter, I could switch to writing about Mount Olympus which I found to be the more creative story.
For thirty days I wrote every day, my worst day I wrote less than five hundred words, on the last day I wrote over four thousand. It was exhausting. Every spare few minutes in the day I would try to pound out a few hundred words. If I wasn't actually writing the novel I was thinking about it every hour of the day. The story completely filled my brain, everything I did could be potential inspiration for a scene - I went jogging, maybe my character goes jogging. I didn't read anything else last month, I didn't watch much TV. I did get out, hiking, running, meeting up with friends, and took three days off for camping around Thanksgiving. I was thinking or talking about my novel, pretty much all the time. There wasn't any time to be unproductive. To get to fifty thousand words, I had to be wordy, whereas I usually pride myself on the conciseness of my writing. I noticed even the e-mails I wrote were getting longer.
The second and third weeks were hard, I didn't want to rush the story along, so I spent a lot of time describing settings and characters. I would write in excruciating detail about how Peter went about making dinner, or what Zeus' office looked like. Though many of these scenes I wrote because I couldn't think of anything to write they added a lot of depth to the characters. I tried when I remembered to instill emotions and strong character traits but character development is something I really need to work at.
The last week of writing came easily. I was used to spending hours a day writing. Often I broke the word count into blocks, four sessions of five hundred words and I would have two thousand words for the day. As the story was ending I felt sad, I knew I would miss my characters and the love hate relationship I had with the novel. Then on November 28 I hit 50,077 words. I was done, many of the last thousand words were back story, filling out earlier sections so when I was done, I didn't have any story left to tell. I closed up my laptop and didn't open it for a week. My brain went empty, I couldn't think about my novel, even when I tried. I wanted to think about editing, about parts I could expand on or delete but somehow the novel was gone from my brain.
Then last night I was at a meeting at an office which was a large part of the setting of my novel and it all came back in a flood. Suddenly all I could think about was the novel again, though I was supposed to be focusing on the meeting at hand. I printed it out last night and started reading it for the first time. Printed out at eighty pages the weight of the task really hit me, this was a piece of work. I read the first couple of pages, it's not badly written, it's sort of boring but maybe it gets better later on. As part of winning NaNoWriMo each writer gets one free proof copy of her book from a publisher. I'm excited about having a book with my name on it on my shelf, it definitely needs some editing, and I have to break it into paragraphs and chapters. As my first novel I don't expect it to be perfect, it is far far longer than anything I have ever written in my life. I found last month that I have 50,000 words in me and that I could get them out in thirty days.
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