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.