So I win. Now what?

Last night, one day early, I “won” NaNoWriMo with an official word count of 50,023, in a story with a working title of “Crossing Lines.” I have to admit that as much as I struggled with the validity of the project, particularly around the 20,000 word mark, I have learned a lot about myself, my writing, and what works for me during this past month.

The story that I originally set out to write ended at 20,000 words, and at 40,000 words I was running out of ideas, but NaNo pushed me to keep asking, “Okay, what happens next?” The twists and turns that my characters took gave me new ideas about what the book was really about, and although I started with a simple story, I now realize that this work is much more complex.

I originally wrote a Part I from three different characters’ points of view, and then wrote a Part II (twenty-five years later) from one character’s point of view. The story was originally about a love triangle, but it morphed into two love triangles, and now I realize it is really about the man I followed in Part II and his quest for happiness. This means that Part II is really Part III, and I now have an idea for a Part II covering the middle twenty-five years. A 20,000 word story is now a 50,000 word manuscript with potential for another 30,000 words, and it will need extensive rewriting and revisions to clean it up and make it work. But the process of continuously and regularly writing helped me to develop characters, themes, and storylines that I never saw coming when I started the project. It has also made me excited to find out what comes next for this story, as well as other stories that bubbled up through my consciousness while I was writing this one.

My plan for Crossing Lines is to put it away for a few months, then pull it out, read it over, and reevaluate what I want to do with it. In the meantime, I’m going to be starting two stories. One, tentatively called “Lucky Lucy,” is a story about a librarian that speaks with the dead. The other, tentatively called “Like a Saint,” is about a young woman’s move back home to live in the shadow of her deceased mother. I figure that I’ll work on both stories at the same time and see which one attracts my attention after the first week, and I’ll go from there.

I’ll be applying what I learned from NaNo, which is essentially that I need a general story line but not a detailed outline to write a first draft. The more detailed an outline, the more problems I seem to have with pacing, descriptions, and tensions. When I use a more general outline, as I did with the last thirty thousand words in Crossing Lines, I seem to get more out of the writing process. Hopefully, by the end of December, I’ll have determined which story has more potential for the time being and can take it further in January, which may or may not be a project for JaNoWriMo. We’ll see if I have enough energy after surviving the holidays to take it this far.

In other news, my self-imposed ban on reading has been lifted, which means I can continue my slog through "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown.  How unfortunate.

No focus leads to new directions

I am learning all sorts of things about myself, my writing, and writing in general during NaNo.  First, I learned that writing is a personal experience of sorts, and that write-ins, although fun and socially invigorating, do not put any words on my page.  This does not mean that I won't go to them anymore, but it means that when I budget my writing time, I will not assume that I will write 5,000 words in one day at a write-in. 

That was a very bad assumption on my part.

I am now 21 days into NaNo and the good news is that I have written over 34,000 words, which puts me almost exactly on target with NaNo's guidelines of 1,667 words per day.  Unfortunately, it puts me about 8,000 words behind on my own personal schedule because I got absolutely nothing written during the write-in last week and then promptly followed that up with several days of slacking.  Write or Die got me back on track, but I'm still behind enough that I'm contemplating taking my laptop to my husband's family's annual Thanksgiving trip, which I had hoped to avoid.  I guess I have four more days to pull it together before then.

But I digress.  I am writing to give an update on my crazy venture into life without outlines, and I am pleased to say that it is working--sort of.  I identified a "plot part II" for my characters, killed one off, and let the others go at it any way they choose.  The interesting thing is that without having an outline that defines where I am heading, my characters have reacted more naturally to the situations that I put them in and I have new ideas about how to formulate the beginning of the story now that I have a new idea for the end.  I actually like the direction the book is going now much more than I did when I started writing it.  I recognize that the disorganization and changing course halfway through would result in very necessary and extensive rewriting, but I never intended this story to be read by anyone else anyway so that's not the issue.

The bigger problem is that, in my "real world" job, I write constantly, and I live and die by the outline.  I write strictly non-fiction in my day job, and I typically prepare an outline, write the piece, extract an outline from what I've written, and then reorganize, rewrite, and polish.  It is a very functional process for the line of work that I do.  Unfortunately, the fiction that I wrote this month using this process sounds a lot like the non-fiction I write, and that is not a good thing.

So, I guess my point is that I'm 10,000 words into my crazy experiment and it's working.  It's shaking me up and making me better.  What are you doing to get yourself moving in a new direction?

There are two paths you can go by

I'm sitting at my first NaNo write-in.  So far, I am the only attendee because I am ridiculously early as usual, but I expect that to change shortly.  Instead of getting into my story, I thought I'd take a moment to note where I'm at so that when I finish this crazy month, I can appreciate how far I've come.

I crossed the 20,000 word mark yesterday, and I must admit, I'm in a panic about what to do.  The main story is finished, in that all of the necessary plot elements are present and written.  This means I have to fit 30,000 words somewhere into that main plot.  I recognize that I tend to leave descriptions out the first time around, so adding that in where appropriate has helped me raise my word count.  Realistically, however, 30,000 words just does not fit into 20,000 unless you decide to go on a hundred page jaunt with Tom Bombadil, which I refuse to do.

This means I am at the proverbial crossroads in the woods.  Do I attempt to stick with my main story and add in more back story and descriptions, flesh out the main story more, etc., or do I go in a completely different direction?

Here is what I've decided.

I will continue to flesh out the story so far until I hit 25,000 words.  At that point, I will have finished filling out the outline that I started with.  I will have learned where I can expand and how better to pace an outline next time.  The next 25,000 words will be uncharted waters.  It is this 25,000 words that will consist of me writing with no outline.

If you knew my "real world" training, this would make you spit out your coffee and laugh.  But, in the spirit of this great experiment that is NaNo, I feel compelled to do what all the writing books tell me and find out what works for me.  I like the outline method, and I feel comfortable with it, but I'm curious as to where things will go when I have no boundaries.

Next post may be me rueing my insanity.  We'll see.

Welcome

Good afternoon, and welcome to my blog! 

You'll notice that it's my first post.  You may also know that this post is going up during NaNoWriMo, which means I am taking on a new writing project at the same time I am wrangling with writing a 50,000 word novel in one month.  Yes, I realize this is insane.  No, I am not copy-pasting the blog entries into my novel to pad my word count.  (Although I did briefly consider it.  After all, one of my characters is a writer, so surely he needs a blog too!)

I've been writing for years.  I'm one of those people that kept notebooks in middle school, then moved on to a word processing program on my Commodore 64, then promptly either lost or destroyed all of it at the end of high school during a fit of senioritis.  College happened, then grad school -- two degrees that had very little to do with anything literary -- and I began writing less and less while I struggled with my academic demands.

Now things have come full circle, and for the last year or so, I've been writing fiction again.  This time, however, I'm not doing it tucked away in a corner of my basement.  I swear I'll be more social and more open with my work this time, because I have a feeling that's what it will take to make me a better writer.  So, I signed up for NaNo, joined a local writing group, signed up for Twitter, and I'm "coming out" as a writer here, on this blog, in the hopes that I can join all the great conversations about writing that I've been lurking in for the past year.

This is just the start of a writer's journey, and I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with it.  Along the way, I will probably muse about my own writing, ask questions, give research tips (in my other life, I do a lot of research), review books I'm reading, and hopefully keep all whining to a minimum.  If you have any comments, feel free to post them, because I'm always interested in what you have to say. 

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!

Alissa