November madness...

When I look a little too closely at some of the people participating in National Novel Writing Month, I have to admit I get a little dubious about them. Sure, some of the ideas sound decent, intriguing, even, when you run across threads all about word-padding and dares of unlikely things to sneak into your novel, you have to tilt your head a little to the side to understand exactly where these people's priorities lie.

The idea, of course, is to write a 50,000 word novel in a month, which balances out to a minimum of 1666 words per day. It's a good concept. The idea is write as much as you can and then edit later. Of course there's obvious hurdles to face. Firstly, most NaNo books are less-than-well-plotted, with authors simply making things up as they go along, and again, with the timeline and word-count pressure, there's a lot of padding going on.

I couldn't help but see this (admittedly with some outside encouragement) as a chance to give myself a kick in the pants in the WIP department.

Since sometime September, I've been working on a huge-scale YA fantasy novel, which I expect will end up around 125,000 words. In the first four weeks, I had 10,000 words written. This story was like a godsend. I felt literally as if it were simply being handed to me out of midair, everything was flowing so beautifully and so easily.

And then... it stopped. That's just how it is with writing, a new project can energize and amaze us in ways that we don't expect, and before we know it words are literally pouring onto the page, but eventually things always plateau.

So there I was, in the middle of October, with business trips and So. California wildfires stressing me out and and consuming RL, and I was sitting there, staring at this plateau. I'd look back at the 10K I'd written, almost misbelieving how easy it was, when there I was, struggling to get 100 words down.

That's when my friend and CP Isabelle encouraged me to join her in NaNoWriMo. Even up until yesterday I was doubting that the mad frenzy that I'd seen in NaNo last year (where I failed utterly to reach 50K, but I blame that on school) could possibly help me the way she was thinking it would.

But today I'm reconsidering. Word-warring with Isabelle, I got a good 2000 words written, and not poor-quality stuff that I hated, just stuff that I knew I needed but was resisting in my mind for one reason or another.

The truth is, I already know my characters so well that they won't let me take them too far off the path the novel should be taking, which I have to admit is a very nice place to be in right now.

Do I think that I can write a whole novel in a month? Definitely not. Not this novel, at least. But would 50,000 words get me a lot closer to finishing this sucker in the time I'm attempting? (Which is by the end of June, btw.) Sure it would. Maybe I'm fooling myself again, but you never know. My naive optimism has saved me as a writer before.