This time two weeks from now, I will be very tired. I will have been up at midnight to pound out the first couple thousand words on a new story that will hopefully magically morph into a novel over the course of the 30 days that are November.
I'm planning on making this the fourth year in a row that I am kicking off the month of craziness with a midnight write. Write for two hours and then sleep until my regular time which is six a.m. get up, make some tea and write some more, eat some breakfast drink some more tea, write some more, go for a walk, write some more, eat lunch. I think I can have 5,000 words by that point and if I"m really focused maybe upwards of 7,500 words. No writing after lunch, though. The rest of the day is for touching up the outline or doing some research and for checking in with anyone I can track down also doing NaNoWriMo. Well, not just anyone, someone I know.
A big part of being focused is being prepared. That and tea, tea which I normally drink by the cup full, but during the month of November will drink by the pot load.
Each year I prepare for this event differently, hoping that I will find something that clicks with me, something that can be my thing for writing a novel. How many years have I done this now? I think this will be my tenth NaNoWriMo, with a failure rate of one third thus far. This can be the year that takes from a D to a C.
Last year I did character development as my preparation. The first part of the story was a dream, which I of course bastardized to fit with an idea I've been kicking around for years. This certainly worked to get me to the word count, but not so much on giving me a story arc, though by the middle of the month I did know where I was going.
Two years ago, I created a timeline of events and did a ton of research. And when I say ton, I do mean quantity and not quality. I did a lot of very broad research, thinking that the story would find it's direction and then I could do deeper research into those areas. I still think that was a good way to work on a sci-fi which is what I was doing. I met my word goal, but didn't finish the story, not even close. There's at least 250k more words to write on this one. I haven't touched it since then because one of the three vantage points is boring the crap out of me, but I like the character so I don't just want to cut her out.
Three years ago, I worked on an urban fantasy. It doesn't seem like it was three years ago. Damn. I just looked through the folder and all of the research is from the following summer when I had moved down here to Coquille. As far as I can tell, I did almost no preparation for this story other than just thinking about it. There is no timeline, no character portraits, no timeline. And yet this was the novel that I finished. Well kind of. I did reach my word goal and I did get to the end of the story, but I stopped writing one of the view points so that I could get to the end. And what's more is that I like this story. It sounds like I did nothing to get ready for this, which is untrue. I just didn't write anything down. Some of the underpinning ideas I've been thinking about since the early 90s.
I should say for this book that I didn't have an outline, or character portraits, or timeline, but I do now. Over the last three weeks or so, I've been putting in a lot of time on this one. I've read it straight though, taking notes for an outline and timeline as well as for fleshing out the character portraits. I've even figured out which direction I ned to go for the second draft. And did I mention that I've written the missing chapters?
This is how I'm preparing for this year's competition - touching and working on a three year old manuscript because it's time to write the sequel. I had ended it in a rather big cliff hanger, but had tied everything up like a good boy. I always knew that there was more to this story. I always planned on revisiting it someday. It turns out that someday is this year, in a couple of weeks.
I don't have a timeline or outline for the new story yet. I do want to have a sketch in place by the start of NaNoWriMo. The research I did after the first manuscript was written so I could touch up things has proved a valuable resource for getting ready for the next part of the story. I am very tempted to say this will be a trilogy, just so I can write no less than four stories for it. But, honestly, I think this is more open-ended than that.
In the next 13 days and change, I will continue working on rewriting the first manuscript and on doing character portraits for two of the new characters I know I'll be adding in this story. I have yet to find a good way to rewrite, by which I mean the physical logistics. My eye sight is poor enough that printing out a copy on paper to mark up isn't terribly feasible (not to mention that since I don't have a working printer that it will be quite expensive to print it up). I haven't found a good electronic answer, either. I spent a lot of time looking for a program that was a text editor with two screens side-by-side. in one would be the original, and the other would be my edit. I want the original to stay the same contentwise, just show spaces where stuff is added or be a different color if deleted. I will handle this by using two text editors (not two tabs in the same one) so that I can have them open next to each other. I will just have to manually scroll and insert space. I know that using OpenOffice or MS Office, I can easily edit while leaving the original text there, I just want to be able to look at a clean copy as I go.
I'm really just making excuses to put of the rewrite. I don't know what non-novelists think occurs with a second draft, from conversation with friends they think it's mostly running spell check and reading it through, adding a word here, deleting a word there. Then you turn it in to your teacher and hope that you did well enough to pass the class. Maybe for some writers it can be that easy, but not for me, not for this book. I need to completely change the narrative style of the whole book - switch out of first person to third person limited with focus on a particular character per chapter, but allowing insight into that character's thoughts. That means everything needs to be rewritten, though perhaps I can retain some of the better dialogue.
Believe it or not, this post is part of the prep. To be a writer, you need to write. Sometimes it doesn't matter what you write, just that you write. I don't know about developing my own voice, I think that the story should dictate the storyteller's voice to some extent. But, I do need to develop skillsets to be a competent writer. It's more important than you can imagine for me to know that I can sit down and in the course of 25 days or so kick out about 100,000 words. I have the confidence to start writing and to not be down on myself if it seems like crap, because to be frank it is crap. Not all of it of course, otherwise I would have already given up, but most of it is crap. I have seen that number go down, though. Those first 50,000 words, I was hoping to get maybe 2,500 our of it that was worth keeping. Anything extra, and let me tell you that there is not a lot extra with that book, is all bonus. Things have progressed to the point where I'm hoping that around a quarter of what I write will be worth keeping. And worth keeping doesn't mean without rewriting.
If I don't forget or go totally lazy, I plan on writing at least one more NaNo themed post before it starts and then writing updates as I go. Last year I wrote a ton of emails and forum posts during NaNoWriMo because writing is not a chore for me any longer. It's something that I do, and if I go a whole day without writing, I feel kind of dirty. And not the good kind of dirty.
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