barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011

For the second time in my life I failed at National Novel Writing Month. The first time was in 2006. At that time I was working 12 hours a day at my regular job, and when I got to the point where I actually saw the end of the novel in sight, I lost all interest. It was kind of like running a marathon and seeing the finish line a mile or two ahead, then quitting to eat a plate of nachos. I guess I just wanted to know that I could do it, and when it became obvious that it was possible, I gave up.

It didn't bother me at all at that time, though, because the novel was ridiculous crap. I don't remember it very well other than that it was a piece of sci-fi absurdism, where each scene was intentionally more ridiculous than the previous scene. I walked away from it like Vin Diesel walking away from an exploding building.

This year, I thought I'd give it another try, starting at something like 12:09am on November 1. I had vague ideas about a trio of characters, but mainly I had a certain cadence in mind. This was going to be dark humor about a man who suspects he may have evil tendencies, and tries to counteract these tendencies, but the universe keeps cornering him, forcing him to do bad things. I wrote 1,300 words of this before realizing that my characters were despicable and not very much fun to hang around with.

Rather than plod down a road I didn't want to travel, I started over on November 2. My next attempt had exclusively likable characters. The trouble was, I didn't have much plot. I wrote about 16,000 words before calling it quits.

I know I used the word "failed" at the beginning of this post, but I hesitate to take that word very seriously. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish with this year's NaNoWriMo, each more important than putting down a novel-length story:

To re-establish the habit of writing daily.
To learn about the process of writing long fiction.

I enjoy writing, even though I find it much more attractive to avoid it for other things, so the first goal was pretty easy to accomplish. Number two was really interesting, however. I learned that I can't write a novel the NaNoWriMo way -- in a giant push.

I'm not a verbose person.

So even though I didn't write a novel in a month, or even come close, I'm still writing. I have a new story in mind, based on a tiny snippet of my second attempt this year. This snippet ended up having no place in the original story. I guess that's another thing I learned. Sometimes you have to write a bunch of extraneous stuff to figure out what you actually want to say.

I want to plot out my new story very meticulously. It's okay to sketch, but ultimately you have to draw.

[filepath: /journal]