I also tried a structure I enjoyed in Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett
Havemercy by ______.  Why not?  It’s Nano, anything goes.  And I’m pretty happy with that too.  Two of the characters have distinct voices, I think, and the third one’s coming along.  I can whip him into shape in revisions.

So I’m right on schedule: it’s been about six months since I blogged here. What’s that? Other people blog every day, sometimes more than once a day? Well shit.

I think I suffer from boxitis. What is this blog for? I ask myself repeatedly. No one answers, so it becomes a blog about nothing except crickets chirping. The lonely, lonely crickets.

***

It’s December, which means last month was November, which means NaNoWriMo. I love NaNo with all my heart, because no matter how bad my writing slump is, I know I’ll be able to abandon all my self-criticism and just pour something onto the page. And I’m usually shocked at how good it is. I mean first-draft good, not publishable good. I am not one of the people on the NaNo forums who is “publishing” my novel at CreateSpace or torturing agents with my rough draft.

Instead, I use NaNo as a way to push myself. This year I tried an epic fantasy for the first time since I started writing seriously. I was a little nervous about that, because NaNo is not the best time to stare into space and worldbuild. But it worked out well. I planned ahead enough but not too much and the world grew by itself.

I also tried a structure I enjoyed in Havemercy by Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett: multiple first person narrators.  Why not? It’s Nano, anything goes. And I’m pretty happy with that too. Two of the characters have distinct voices, I think, and the third one’s coming along. I can whip him into shape in revisions.

Last, I made my goal 80,000 words for the month, not just 50,000. And I made it. The book’s at about 95,000 now, with just a couple of chapters left. But it’s harder without the NaNo momentum to keep me going. Also, this will make a grand total of three books finished with an actual climax and resolution. So I’ve not had much practice at endings, and it’s hard to tie up all the plot threads without letting the story sort of drift off into space.

But I’ll get through it. Because this one I want people to read. Every rough draft I write gets a little cleaner. Even with all the story problems, I’m at least not ashamed of my prose. And I really need some feedback. I need some validation that I can tell a decent story, that I’m not wasting my time polishing turds.

What if my beta readers tell me it’s crap? I don’t know. I’ll cry, I imagine, because I’ve wanted to be a writer my whole life and finally feel like I’m getting there. So if I’m wrong about my progress, it will be hard to hear.

But even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. I’ve started reading again at Absolute Write, one of the best writing resources on the web. Whatever my problem is, I can find advice on moving on and give it another shot. In my NaNo novel, I gave one of my characters the line, “You don’t stop learning until you’re dead.”  I always want that to be true for myself.

I fell over the finish line at about 10:30 p.m. on November 30 with 50,060 words. So I made it. I wrote more words on one project than I ever have before. I even feel slightly more like a writer.

I didn’t, however, finish a draft. I do have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but parts of the middle are more like “notes” than “scenes.” In order for me to feel like I’ve finished a rough draft, I need to flesh out these notes into actual scenes, but I need a little break before doing any more writing.

So this weekend I started outlining my novel in yWriter. Why am I outlining after I’ve written, you might ask? Well, I started with a rough outline, but I found that as I wrote, the story took off in a few different directions, I added characters here and there, and the result is kind of a mess. yWriter is helping me get a big picture look at my novel and where I need to add and remove material. I’ll review yWriter on Friday.

NaNoWriMo was both harder and easier than I thought it would be. Harder because despite all my elaborate planning, I was still writing right down to the wire. A large part of this, of course, was due to the trouble I had with my wrists in the second week. The rest was due to procrastination.

But NaNo was easier than I anticipated because although I began with only a hazy idea of a plot and a couple of characters, I was never stuck for long. When I came to a scene I didn’t know how to write, I just made a note about what needed to happen in that scene and continued. After I reached the end, I went back and completed some of those scenes, and I still have several left to write. But I was never afflicted with the dreaded writer’s block. Distracted, yes, blocked no. Amazingly, I don’t really find the process of writing to be difficult. The hard part is making myself sit down and write. So whether or not I write is a matter of discipline rather than inspiration, which is an encouraging thought. I suspect this was the case all along; I just needed to prove it to myself.

Please notice that I didn’t say that writing well is easy. My rough draft is just that: rough, unpolished, sometimes incomprehensible. But I expected that, and I embrace that. A rough draft means that I didn’t let myself get distracted by all the mistakes I was making. I didn’t let myself revise as I was writing, which is the curse that’s always made me lose interest in my previous novel attempts. So I’m proud of my draft full of stumbling sentences and awkward dialog, because it means I stood back and let myself write.

Of course, the roughness of my draft also means I have a lot of work ahead of me, but really, I can’t imagine it being any other way. Perhaps after my twentieth novel, the process will be smooth and logical, but I never expected my first novel to be something anyone would want to read but me. All the same, I’m looking forward to revising it after I’ve finished those few last scenes and set it aside for a month or so. I believe that working through the whole process is the only way to learn how to write a novel.

I know that NaNo isn’t for everyone, but it’s been a great experience for me. I’ve renewed my faith in myself as a writer, and I’ve written more on one project than I ever have before. I’m already looking forward to my next novel and next year’s NaNoWriMo. And parts of me are thinking about other crazy writing things I can do. Maybe I’ll try to write a novel in a week, or a weekend. Or maybe I’ll make my next project much longer. Maybe I’ll start that epic fantasy novel I’ve always wanted to write. Maybe my next novel will be in a different genre.

NaNo has also challenged me to try new methods of writing. This time, I started with only vague ideas for plot and character. Next time I might try a more detailed outline. And of course, now I have the opportunity to try writing in a whole new way with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. My NaNoWrMo experience has given me the confidence to reach for my writing goals.

If you participated in NaNoWriMo, I’d love to know how it went for you. Were you satisfied with the results of your efforts? Would you recommend the experience to others? Let me know in the comments.

This is my fourth report on my progress toward my goal of completing a 50,000 word novel by November 30 as part of National Novel Writing Month. Read more of my thoughts on NaNoWriMo.

It’s not looking so great. My word count is stalled at just over 30,000 words. Yesterday was supposed to be my big catch-up day, but it seemed like I was distracted by one thing after another. I’m starting to lose faith that I can actually finish my novel by the end of the month. I do have Friday off from work, but I’m not sure how many words I can write in one day. I guess I’ll find out.

I did finally receive my Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. As I’d suspected, I don’t think I’m going to get used to it quickly enough for it to be a real asset for this year’s NaNoWriMo. I’m finding it hard to concentrate on my story and remember to enunciate at the same time. I’m sure I’ll re-learn how to speak clearly, but for now, using Dragon is slower than typing for me, especially when Dragon hears one of my characters’ names, Beth, as “death” every other time I say it. I’ll write a complete review of Dragon once I’ve used the software a little more.

Next Monday will be my last NaNoWriMo Report for the year. I’ll let you know how it all turned out.

They’re always lurking there, just out of sight. Turn your head fast enough and you just might catch them in the act. They’re ready to pounce whenever your attention wavers for a moment.

What are they? They’re ideas that are better than what I’m currently working on. They’re ideas that will ultimately let me down in the same way the current ideas are, but the new ideas have so much promise. It’s so tempting to follow them into the wilderness and never return.

Over the weekend, I was attacked by two story ideas entirely unrelated to my NaNoWriMo novel. One of them was a flash of insight into a story I had originally considered writing for NaNo. I didn’t choose that idea at the beginning of the month because it was really just fragments of a story, gaping plot holes held together with a few bits of thread. But this weekend I had some ideas to patch those holes, and I started to wonder if I should have gone with that idea instead.

The problem I’ve always had with writing a long piece like a novel is that I need to work on it every day to keep the creative energy flowing. If I go more than a day without writing at least a paragraph or two, I lose the thread entirely. When I have to reread to remember what I was writing, I get caught up in editing and never get back to writing. After this happens a few times, I’m completely bored with the first few chapters. It seems easier to start over with a new idea, swearing that I won’t let myself get sidetracked again.

I’ve written about fighting distraction before, in Learning Patience. But it never gets any easier. The monster always uses a different tactic, a different lure to tempt me away from what I should be doing. I know I’m not alone. Many other writers on the NaNo forums have come up with fantastic ideas in the middle of the month when their novels are languishing. Some followed their new ideas with greater success. Some chose to stick with the original plan.

Last weekend I gave in to the wild ideas and had a blast writing about something different. At first I despaired of ever returning to my NaNo novel. I was afraid I’d get sucked into my new story and end up with another half-finished novel on my hands. But after I’d written down my new ideas, the headlong rush slowed. Writing the new novel wasn’t going to be any easier than working on the old.

I realized what I needed was time to reflect on my NaNo novel. No pressure to write, just time to think. I looked at my story as though it belonged to someone else, asking the questions a reader might ask. What happens next? How can the characters possibly get out of this mess? Why do I like these characters so much? As though they had been there all along, the answers popped into my head, and I ran with them straight to the computer and started typing.

I’m still only at 23,000 words, which makes me 12,000 words behind if I still plan to reach 50,000 by November 30. But now I have fresh enthusiasm for the story, and I still have hope that when my voice recognition software arrives I’ll be able to sprint to the end. Even if I don’t make 50,000 words, I think I can finish the story by November 30.

I read an interview with a writer whose name I can’t remember who said when he gets bored with what he’s writing, he opens a new file, writes some erotica for a while, then goes back to his real story. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who needs a distraction once in a while.

“You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.”

Neil’s words may not seem inspiring, yet knowing that an author I admire has felt the same way is comforting in a perverse sort of way. The rest of Neil’s pep talk, linked above, is well worth reading for anyone needing inspiration for a creative effort.

Find pep talks by other fantastic writers here.