On the Other Side of 30k

Alright, made it through the battle although by doing something I’ve never done before: skipping ahead.  I got my characters to the place wherein the battle would take place, didn’t know how to write the next part, and skipped ahead to killing my MC’s love interest.  The death and aftermath have been rewarding to write, emotionally tense as they are.  So rewarding, in fact, that I’m not even stressing about that gap.

Because in the end, all that really matters is that I’m moving forward, both plot wise and word-count wise.  I’m nearing the downhill slope that everyone says occurs during the later part of 50k (being now at 31,193 words) and I’m too excited about that to be anything other than thrilled with today’s work.

Updated Word Count: 28,708

Once again I was hoping for a big day word count-wise. And once again I squeaked out just over par. It’s not bad, it’s what I need. But I wanted so much more. It’s just hard to get out more than 2k words in a week day.

On a more positive note I am enjoying my secondary MC who is pointing out how thoroughly ridiculous my MC and her love interest are. And even better, he’s doing it by making Star Trek references which they, being so not as cool as him, totally don’t get. I’m enjoying it. And you know? I honestly don’t give a crap if anybody else would. It’s kind-of nice.

Made my daily word count, though I was hoping to sprint further ahead.  Maybe tomorrow...

Total is past 27k words now, 30k looms along with what promises to be one interesting fight scene.  Hopefully tomorrow I'll get through it and then open up the door for lots of new things my imagination can chew on.

Halfway to 50k!

So, at the end of the day, I’ve crossed the halfway point with 25,350 words. It’s not the 5k day I wanted, but it’s something. And ultimately I’m still ahead of where I need to be so that’s what matters.

Story wise (at this precise moment) I am having my MC describe the last time she fought big bad, right on the eve of fighting him in the keystone battle royal of my story arc. It is not coming easily. The words are not, ahem, flowing. All the videos I’ve been watching on you tube will tell me to skip past this part and go to the next phase of the story I actually think I can write. I’m not entirely sure how to force myself to do that, I’m more inclined to suffer through it. Having never edited one of these novels yet I can’t say whether or not it would be more or less productive to write something I hate or nothing at all. But for now that doesn’t matter.

What matters is pushing forward, one way or another, and just getting the story out. I think it’s going to be very important for me to not edit AT ALL- not one single word. Because my internal critic does not like what I’m writing and, unless kept under constant lock down, it will wreak havoc on my word document. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m doing this in order to suck so if it ends being terrible that’s not only ok, it’s good. If I can get through another 25k words, sucky or wonderful and everything in between, then this is gonna be one seriously worthwhile experience.

Big Mistake

So, I made a HUGE mistake yesterday.  I skipped a day.  I knowingly, with awareness and all reasonable ability to conclude what a horrifically bad idea it was to do this, skipped a day.  And now I am paying the price.

As I said earlier, I'm on the verge of something big and exciting.  I should be barreling into it with reckless abandon.  But instead, I've been sitting here for the past two hours occupying myself with just about every distraction I can find.  I've been watching NaNoWriMo You Tube videos (which there are a tone of, I've just discovered).  I've been writing e-mails.  I even updated my wish list for Christmas.  But I have not written more than a paragraph.  I have no idea why- why would you even ask me that?  There's no logic here, this is insanity talking!

I've got all the inspiration I could possibly need- knowledge that at this very moment, all over the world, people are sitting at their computers doing exactly what I should be doing.  I've got a keyboard in front me attached to a computer working perfectly well.  I've got a comfy chair and blanket and even a puppy cuddled at my feet.  There is nothing on my to-do list other than to write.  What more could I possibly need?

In all honesty, I could seriously do with one of those giant Roman slave drivers with a huge whip and booming voice telling me to type.  But I don't have one of those.  All I have is the knowledge that if I don't do this I am seriously increasing the likelihood of spiraling further down into a self-defeating vortex of doom which may suck the very possibility of hitting 50k right out of my soul, leaving me forever empty and lifeless.  If that's not motivation, I don't know what is.

Now, write!  WRITE LIKE THE WIND!!!!

Under Par

Only 1120 today, bringing the overall total up to 23,396.  But something interesting and unplanned did happen that will allow me to get one of my characters back into the action and hopefully lead me full speed ahead into the first big boss battle.  There will be fighting!  There will be drama!  Someone will die!  It's gotta write itself, right?  Right?  (*whimper*)

Skip The Doorway

So I got another NaNo pep talk today and I found it… disconcerting. Not because the author wasn’t displaying confidence in the NaNoist’s ability to write 50k in a month. No, it was disconcerting because it contained actual, real advice. Like advice that you might take if you were trying to write a real novel you hoped that someone other than yourself might read someday.

The advice was this: skip the doorway. Rather than describing your character walking into a room, just have them be in the room. We don’t usually go into detail about our characters bathroom activities, daily hygiene rituals, favorite method of channel surfing or chosen activity to kill time whilst sitting in rush hour traffic (unless any of those details are important plot points, of course). So why, this pep talker asks, would we spend time describing them walking through that doorway, looking out that window or slamming that car door? He advises that one should pare down the writing to the important points so that one’s reader doesn’t find themselves getting bored with exposition about mundane things which have nothing to do with plot or character development.

This is a good point. And therein lies the source of my discontent. I write about my characters walking through doorways, down hallways and into rooms. I’m pretty sure I’ve written the exact sentence “she walked into the room”, in fact. And I do it because I get caught up in the fact that those five words count towards my word count. I write a superfluous paragraph and am excited that I’m 32 words closer to 50k, rather than acknowledging that those 32 words are unnecessary and, in all likelihood, rather off-putting for a reader who might be trying to get into the story.

Now, I know I said that the point of this whole exercise was to write as terribly as I could possibly allow myself to which means that I certainly shouldn’t be worrying about what a reader might think. But that’s not actually why I’m concerned. I have a pattern in NaNoWriMo which is far more bothersome: I never reach the end.

Factin’s story, in 2009, toped off at over 70k words. Nowhere near the end of the story. Last year’s behemoth, after camp this August, is well over 80k words. (And I’ve already written about my frustration for not finishing the damned thing.) And now? Now I’m 22k words in- nearly halfway to 50k- and I haven’t even had the first big boss battle. (And there are a whole lot of really important plot points that happen between that first battle and the final showdown.) I haven’t written any of that yet.

I’ve been caught up in filler, trying to meet my daily word count by writing about the details of my character walking through that doorway, or closing that latch. And I’d really, really like to reach the end of a story for once. So I have a new task to focus on: write the story, not the word count.

I need to stop worrying about getting from point A to point B and start worrying about point B even being in there so that points C, D, E, F ad nauseum can be reached. I need to write for the sake of moving the plot forward, not for the sake of hitting 50k. I anticipate this being rather difficult, but that’s my goal. Wish me luck!

(22,267 words and counting.)

Day 9

So, the good news is that I have introduced my secondary MC. He is cute. He is geeky. He is insanely talkative. And he is perky in a way that irritates the living hell out of my MC so I’m already having fun writing the two of them bantering.

The bad news? All that banter only added up to 969 words and in the past five minutes I’ve fallen asleep twice while sitting here and staring blankly at the screen. So I’m giving up, short of the daily word count. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll go over and catch up.

Day 8 or Week Two, Depending on How You Look At It

Made my daily word count, with great difficulty.  I'm up to 19,403 words.

Potentially exciting news: my secondary MC has just arrived on the scene and and he's already surprising me with his abilities.  The oddly perky geek-boy nature of his was planned, but the supernatural abilities are coming out as I write.  (Upon first meeting him my MC watches him transform from an unassuming ficus plant into a human being- with no logical explanation.)  I have high hopes for him lightening the mood of what would otherwise be an annoyingly angsty MC-driven story arc.

Here's hoping.

The Right Fight

So, one of the things that my novel is going to have quite a lot of is fight scenes. I’ve already written one and, without going into detail, it was not what I would call good. And yes, I know this whole exercise is all about writing poorly with abandon, but it still takes a lot of effort to leave the scene alone when its suckitude drips down on the pages like rancid meat sauce. But I digress.

Wanting the next one to be at least slightly more readable I did a little research on how to write a fight scene. Have you guys all done this? It’s pretty interesting what advice other writers give you.

Study an actual form of fighting so you have some ideas for moves. Being a relatively advanced black belt I can honestly say that knowing the ins and outs of a particular form of fighting has not actually helped me in writing a fight scene. I mean, at least not that I’m consciously aware of. When I do try to remember a sparring match that I took part in I can never remember any detail that would be helpful. It happens too fast, your focus is too centered in the moment and more often than not when it’s over you don’t really remember the details of who’s foot went where or what move you did that got your instructor to say “yes!”. You just remember that you got that one enthusiastic response so you’re not as bad of a fighter as you think you are. No details or vocabulary that would be helpful comes to mind.

Know how it feels. Another piece of advice I don’t particularly ascribe to? That in order to know how to write what the character felt like when they got hit you should go out and get hit yourself. Really, one site I read said “get someone to hit you in the guts”. Now, due to the above mentioned activity I have been hit a number of times in a variety of unpleasant ways and again I can honestly say that this has not helped me. Besides the fact that, for this particular novel, knowing how it feels for me to get hit will not help me describe how it feels for my MC to get hit because, as I’ve previously mentioned, she is a centuries-old vampire. I’m assuming that her sense of pain is very different than mine.

There are some pointers that I think will be very useful, however. And I will sum them up here whilst recommending that for more comprehensive guides you check out some other resources.

Stay in the moment. Several sites stated how truly disappointing it is to read a fight scene the author obviously didn’t care enough to write and therefore summed up with one sentence. I.E. “He mowed down the angry mob with flaring fists and spastic kicks” or something like that. They all say to stay in the moment, describe the action blow by blow and try to get the reader to feel how crystallized the fighter’s focus is. This, I think, is great advice.

Build tension by using short sentences. The idea here is that since you are doing a play by play you want the timeline broken down to seconds and since your descriptions are only good for one second at a time they have to be short, direct and to the point. This is not the time for long, elaborate descriptions of setting or other visual details. Nor is it the time for thought or even emotion. This is action- physical movements, instantaneous reflexes and abrupt events. Again, I could see this being very important if you have any chance of the reader buying into the scene.

Don’t use fight scenes frivolously. Most of the sites have been recommending that fight scenes serve a very important purpose: to either move the plot forward or illustrate facts about your characters without directly stating them. This, to me, seems kind-of obvious. I mean, if fight scenes are so difficult to write then why would you go out of your way to use them if you didn’t need to? But then I realized: if I was a more aggressive person or were writing without thought-out intent I might start writing fight scenes just cause they look cool on tv or I like describing body parts being dismembered. So I could see this being an important point to make.

Like I said, there are a lot of other tools and advice out there, this is just a sampling based on my experience. For my part, I’m trying to figure out how to make a fight scene believable when I’m writing about a character with superhuman speed, agility, strength, healing ability and reaction time. If anybody has any pointers on that specific context let me know.

(17,703 and counting...)

Busy Day

Why, you may wonder since I only hit par on my word count today, was the day so busy?  I will tell you.  It's because I got up early to take a three hour trek up to visit my parents, spent most of the day with them playing pinochle and eating my father's heavenly made-from-scratch chicken noodle soup and then drove back home.  I am sleepy beyond reason and could so easily have passed out on the couch as soon as I got in the door.

But I didn't.  I pushed through the non-stop yawns and wrote out 1770 words.  New words, mind you.  My head start is finished and I am now 100% on my own with nothing to guide me but a whole bunch of grandiose ideas which may or may not ultimately end up having anything to do with my story. 

And that's the main idea behind this whole adventure, isn't it?  Writing when you haven't got time to write.  Piecing together a story from a mass of crazy ideas and images in your head.  Barreling forward like a blind man in an explosives factory and hoping for the best.  That is the nature of this particular beast.  So I gotta give myself credit for living up to the true spirit of the adventure.  Credit, and permission to go to bed early.

16,421 words and counting.

Update

14,651 words.  And a confession:
I'm cheating.  Most of what I have so far I wrote before now.  So no, I haven't been pounding out 5000 plus words a day.  I've been editing mostly, adding a few words here or a sentence there, reacquainting myself with my characters and plot from the extensive notes from before.

But, as a friend recently pointed out to me, they are still my words.  It's not like I copied them from someone else and am cheating for real (like with plagiarism).  No, this is my story.  Did I come up with it on the spot on November 1st?  No.  I had it fleshed out in my mind well before now.

But according to the rules of NaNoWriMo there's nothing wrong with note taking and brainstorming and plot landscaping before November.  So my notes are more like finished chapters than scattered ideas.  So what?  They're still my words, my prose on the page.  And very shortly I'll be entering into unknown territory when the previously written material runs out.  (Like a few more paragraphs very shortly!)  And then I'll be on my own, heading off into the dark, uncharted space of my imagination with nothing more than a vague roadmap of where I think (and hope) my plot is going to head and a bunch of characters crazy enough to tear up that map and get totally lost out there.

So you know what?  I'll take the head start even if it is bending the rules a bit.  I'll need it when everyone gets lost in the dark.  Here we go...

And Today...

... it's up to 10,021.  Are curse words valid dialog?

Day 2

Up to 8,434.  Struggling not to edit as I write.  But certainly living up to my goal of sucking.

NaNoWriMo 2011 Day 1

Out of the gate with 4,598 words.  And so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.  I have earned a good night's sleep.