I finished NaNoWriMo!
I finished NaNoWriMo this year. My final word count was 52,048. Congratulations go out to your_friend and mkwhite both of whom either completed or were on good pace to complete it this year (hopefully I'm not jinxing anyone). I'm sure others did as well, but those are the two I know of.
I had a lot of fun doing this, but my story didn't quite come off as well as I would have liked. I outlined my story well (which I would highly recommend) so the pacing and consistency were good enough, but it just didn't work the way I thought it would.
My main problem was that I made the classical writing blunder: I tried to make it "good" rather than simply writing something and let the merits speak for themselves. I think any time you, the author, try to be clever or insightful, it's hard to avoid either talking down to the reader or simply looking foolish. I'm pretty sure I did quite a bit of both, but while this particular narrative may have been a failure in most respects, save volume, I do think I've become a better writer because of it.
For me, a vast majority of my writing is in the form of technical reports, so word economy and a tone of authority are very important. These traits can carry over into a good novel, but in this particular case I think I would have been better served leaving them behind. Ah well, live and learn.
What did surprise me was that I readily acknowledged that my concept was faltering at about 34k word mark, but I was able to press on a full 18k words beyond that to finish the NaNoWriMo challenge anyway. I think the final parts got decidedly stronger, but not to the point where I would consider a rewrite of everything....maybe someday, but not now.
My brother wants to know if I would want to try this again in January, as he always wanted to try NaNoWriMo, but November wouldn't work for him. A few weeks ago, I thought I wouldn't do anything of the sort, but now I'm pretty certain that I will give it another go in January with an entirely new premise that I've been kicking about--a far more ridiculous one, but it should be a lot of fun :)
On a final note, I wanted to point out that even though I'm fairly down on the end product I came up with, I had an absolute blast doing this. If you have ever considered NaNoWriMO (or even just writing more regularly) I would strongly recommend it. I thought it was going to take a ton of my time to get this whole thing complete, but I really never had to sacrifice time with my family/fiance/friends, movies, exercise, work, reading, cleaning, surfing the internet or much of anything else to actually write 50k+ words in 30 days. It was easy once I got off my ass and did it. (incidentally, for reference, this is over 500 words right here, so 50k isn't that daunting)
I probably have more I want to say, but I can't think of any of it now.
I had a lot of fun doing this, but my story didn't quite come off as well as I would have liked. I outlined my story well (which I would highly recommend) so the pacing and consistency were good enough, but it just didn't work the way I thought it would.
My main problem was that I made the classical writing blunder: I tried to make it "good" rather than simply writing something and let the merits speak for themselves. I think any time you, the author, try to be clever or insightful, it's hard to avoid either talking down to the reader or simply looking foolish. I'm pretty sure I did quite a bit of both, but while this particular narrative may have been a failure in most respects, save volume, I do think I've become a better writer because of it.
For me, a vast majority of my writing is in the form of technical reports, so word economy and a tone of authority are very important. These traits can carry over into a good novel, but in this particular case I think I would have been better served leaving them behind. Ah well, live and learn.
What did surprise me was that I readily acknowledged that my concept was faltering at about 34k word mark, but I was able to press on a full 18k words beyond that to finish the NaNoWriMo challenge anyway. I think the final parts got decidedly stronger, but not to the point where I would consider a rewrite of everything....maybe someday, but not now.
My brother wants to know if I would want to try this again in January, as he always wanted to try NaNoWriMo, but November wouldn't work for him. A few weeks ago, I thought I wouldn't do anything of the sort, but now I'm pretty certain that I will give it another go in January with an entirely new premise that I've been kicking about--a far more ridiculous one, but it should be a lot of fun :)
On a final note, I wanted to point out that even though I'm fairly down on the end product I came up with, I had an absolute blast doing this. If you have ever considered NaNoWriMO (or even just writing more regularly) I would strongly recommend it. I thought it was going to take a ton of my time to get this whole thing complete, but I really never had to sacrifice time with my family/fiance/friends, movies, exercise, work, reading, cleaning, surfing the internet or much of anything else to actually write 50k+ words in 30 days. It was easy once I got off my ass and did it. (incidentally, for reference, this is over 500 words right here, so 50k isn't that daunting)
I probably have more I want to say, but I can't think of any of it now.