29 days and some hours until NaNoWriMo

[tephra]

Yes, I plan to do it again. I even have a vague idea to work from. Very vague. I still have time though, so I'm not worried about that yet.

This will be my sixth NaNo. I've noticed some trends in my NaNo experiences that are rather depressing. It gets harder every year for one. Here's a bit of a review of the experiences:

2006
Working Title: Voices of the Valley at the time. Briefly Voiceless Valley. Currently By Destiny Stained
Setting: Fantasy not set on earth with humanoid rodents rather than humans.
50K On November: 26
Verified Words: 50,012

I decided to try NaNo about a week and a half before the start and babbled at hafoc until I'm quite sure he was sick of brainstorming my setting with me. I should have taken better notes, but more about that later. I was actually pretty well prepared on October 31st. I was already experiencing some upset to my normal writing progression though, my characters, which normally arrive before any hints of setting or plot, were late.

This first NaNo was also my first time deliberately writing scenes out of order. Normally I sit down and write a story from start to finish. While the story might not flow chronologically, I do use flashbacks sometimes, the scenes happen in the order they are written. With the pressure of a deadline I had to do something to get unstuck though, so I jumped ahead and wrote a scene I had thought of that wouldn't happen until near the end of the story. I still haven't managed to link up the start of the story to that scene.

I have poked at this story several times in the years since. I need to revise to adjust the technology level, adding windmills into the valley of nearly constant wind for instance, but in the end this story is probably the one that needs the least fixing in terms of writing. Unfortunately I didn't take enough world-building notes and will need to recreate whatever astronomical and geological systems I had cooked up to make the weather act like it needs to to drive the plot.

Looking back at my old posts I have to smile. If the me back then, who thought her writing was crap, saw what I end up writing in NaNo stories now she'd have a meltdown. That first NaNo was the cleanest of them in terms of readable drafts, and the easiest to write no matter how much I whined at the time. Those posts also reveal a reoccurring problem with my writing, flailing around trying to find a plot.


2007
Working Title: Dead Dolls
Setting: Cyberpunk. Alternate universe. Lots of nanotechnology. Advanced bio-medical technology.
50K On November: 30
Verified Words: 50,236

My characters arrived first, which is my normal writing process. It should have been easy, right?

The original idea was more a psychological mystery, one of those stories where you aren't sure what is real and what is just in the character's head. I was thinking artificial intelligence and psychiatry and maybe even a hospital setting. I dropped a lot of references into the story via character names even after abandoning that plot as unworkable within the time constraints of NaNo.

I don't think I ever found the plot on this one. I dropped my characters into a Situation and they spent their 50k of words getting out of it and running. I made up a lot of the culture and tech as I went, which left me with a whole lot of ends to weave in both directions. It also means I have to sit down and really think about how technology would impact the culture, and the reverse.

My writing progress was fairly abysmal. I did a lot of knitting instead of writing, this being the first year I knitted Christmas gifts for family. By the 21st I was twelve thousand words behind schedule. I did manage to write nearly seven thousand words on the 26th, which made finishing on time possible. In the end I wrote 28,252 words in just five days in order to meet the deadline.

I grew rather attached to my story, even if I had (and still have) no idea where it was going. So hearing about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse in May really put a crimp on continuing it. I've since decided that, while there is some overlap in theme between the show and aspects of the culture in my story, there's enough difference that it doesn't matter.


2008
Working Title: Escapement
Setting: Steampunk. Some amount of alternate history of course. Alchemy. Occult rituals. Supernatural beings. Some Lovecraftian seasoning.
50K On November: 29
Verified Words: 50,041

I only made six journal entries regarding this NaNo. I had convinced toshirodragon to write for NaNo as well and most of my whiny chatter ended up going to her AIM window.

Based on my very brief posts I again had a character to start building the story with. I know I started the story with Prudence about to leave England on a steam-powered submersible and that, try as I might, the story just would not go. I ended up restarting the story with Pru already in Boston and then it went much better. Of course the failed start stayed in the file, I wrote it in November and it counted. This would become my saving grace with the word count. I gave myself permission to write a scene as it came to mind. If the scene didn't work I'd just hit enter a few more times and start the scene again, or skip to another scene entirely.

The end result of the new habit of writing and abandoning scenes seems to have been the rise of two possible plot lines. Looking at what I ended up with I think I could pull the two main "plots" apart and rearrange them to happen one after the other rather than mixing them up together as they are now. Sarah's discovery pretty much knocked Pru's plans off the rails.

I did a lot of knitting during this NaNo as well, mostly things that could be finished in a day or two. It didn't seem to negatively impact my word counts.


2009
Working Title: Of Ledgers and Legions was the horrible title I stuck on the thing for the NaNo site
Setting: Current day fantasy. Lots of supernatural beings. Possibly some alternate history.
50K On November: 30
Verified Words: 50,506

There were only five posts for this year in my journal,most of my babbling once again went to Kris' AIM. There were no posts at all between the 15th and the 30th.

The main character showed up on October 30th, just a name and an impression of her appearance. I flailed around for a profession for her and went with forensic accountant. This was not an inspiring choice. However, setting up her office did lead to a second character. From there a relationship was introduced and the world grew around them. The world is pretty much this one, with added magic and supernatural creatures.

After flailing around for a plot I ended up grabbing an original character out of a horrible mess of a Harry Potter fanfic that I plotted out years ago. Well, sort of plotted. Mostly I made a bushel of characters with interesting backgrounds and relationships and by the time I was done it looked more like a crossover than an HP fic.

Anyway, the character I grabbed had a Significant Event in her past that would fit well into this universe so I scraped off the fanfic veneer and plopped her down in the middle of things. The problem became that I hadn't worked out her story before the Event, or even the cause of it, and I ended up still flailing for what happened next. I am not cut out for mystery writing, that's for certain.

Ultimately I fell into using flash backs. Badly set up ones too, one step removed from "As you know, Bob". But in doing that I found some actual plots, ones that were complete and resolved in respect to where I was in the story timeline when I started them. So this NaNo is still salvageable, but probably as a serious of short stories. As for the poor fanfic refugee... well I still have to figure out why her life ended up like it did.

2010
Working Title: Never on a Blue Moon
Setting: Near future/current day fantasy. Alternate history. Magic.
50K On November: 28
Verified Words: 50,184

I was a lot more prolific with journal posts than I had been in the last two years, even if Kris was still getting her metaphorical ear chatted off over AIM.

My main character came to mind on the way to Anthrocon, in June. Granted, he didn't bring a lot of detail with him other than a name and physical appearance, but he stuck around until NaNo. I had no problems with him, the characters added on the fly though, they were another thing all together.

I cannot base characters on real people. I can't even name them after people I know, even if those are really common names. I will unconsciously start giving the characters traits the real people have. It will snowball. Things will get uncomfortable as the fictional characters made associations in my head to the real people they shared names with. I will end up not wanting to write at all.

Thankfully I discovered this problem early on, in the first week, and was able to change names and details enough so the characters started to evolve away from the real people. There are still more traits in common than I would like with the first of them (the one that triggered the others) but I can manage him.

This story simply did not want to move. I eventually broke down and wrote what amounted more to outlines, character sketches, and alternate earth history cliff notes when no story would come out. I know this means that I've taken the story in the wrong direction somewhere. Like back in 2008, I probably should have stopped and restarted from another point, but I couldn't think of a point to start from.

Halfway through the month I did the one thing that has helped the word count for every NaNo. I added more characters. Those first impressions and "introductions" add more words than using an existing character, and it also gives me more forks in the path to follow the story down. I was so desperate for something to write this year I added four in one shot. In the last week I added another six. It was with those six, which took me back to the events of the first scene I wrote at the start of it all, that the words finally started to flow. I suspect I started out with the wrong character and should have started with these six.

The main thing I learned from this NaNo is that I can hammer out the words to meet a word count deadline even if I have zero motivation or inspiration. Unfortunately I've also learned that the majority of those words would never survive even the first round of editing.


So in the end it boils down to this:

• Unless I have a really good idea I'm going to be whiny and complain a lot.


• Even with a good idea I'm still going to whine.


• When the writing goes well, it will go very well.


• When it goes badly, it can go very, very badly.


• I can, if pressed, knock out about seven thousand words in a day.


• I am much more comfortable getting a day or two of buffer built up and sticking between fifteen hundred and two thousand words.


• When I'm stuck, add more characters or split them up so I have more than one location to write about.


• If the story just will not move I'm probably pushing in the wrong place.


• In general, the less I post the worse it's going.

Comments

[clare_dragonfly]

There's a Windows beta of Scrivener; it doesn't have all the features of the Mac version yet but it does have the basic scene organization stuff. Maybe they'll have the full version out in time for NaNo this year.

Plotting is hard! I don't have any advice for that! XD

[tephra]

I may have to play with Scrivener too then and see which, if either, works for me. Apparently getting my 50k for NaNo would get me 50% off Scrivener so if I do like it I could probably scrape the money from somewhere to buy it.

Plotting is the hardest part of writing for me. :( I guess if I keep stabbing at it I might hit on something what works eventually. :D

[clare_dragonfly]

Yeah, I have the same problem. I hope we both figure something out XD