Whew. With taking an hour off work this afternoon and not having any karate to go to tonight, I managed to put down 4,800 words tonight, and crossed the finish line. I’ll expand on my post later (my hands are tired– almost 5,000 words on manual typewriters) but I will say that (a) I’m happy with my novel this year, (b) I’m finished pretty early, but I wanted to finish before my Vancouver trip on Monday and (c) I learned some really interesting lessons this year, especially when compared to last year’s attempt.
Yay! I’m finished. Boo! Now I have to wait until next year to do it again.
Updated
First, let’s talk about pace. NaNoWriMo is sort of like the 400 m event in track and field: just short enough to be considered a sprint, long enough to need endurance. I finished in 24 days, which beats my previous best from 2009 of 25 days, but that year, my story ended up at 60,000 words, not 50,000. This was the third year I used manual typewriters but more importantly the second since I resumed martial arts training. Last year I know I was having trouble fitting in my writing after coming home from hours of training and driving to Cedar Hill and back. I only had one “flameout” day where I didn’t write anything, and that was the night of my karate belt grading. Three other days I missed the minimum of 1,667 words, but that was due to aiming for typing the right number of pages for that target, and falling a little short due to dialog or other things that meant the pages had fewer words than expected.
I was surprised that the trip to Vaughan, Ontario wasn’t more of an impact. Perhaps it was because the workshop went really well, but I managed to make my minimum each night on the road. Part of the reason I forged ahead this year was in fear that I would lose six days’ writing due to those trips.
This is the first year where I have finished feeling really good about my novel. The first year wasn’t bad, and it was a real rush to realize that I’d done it, but I had and still have some unhappiness about how it turned out. It sits in need of major revisions. 2009 was a struggle, and when I finished I never wanted to see that novel again, but I re-read it prior to last November, and I was shocked at how well it worked once I had disassociated myself from it. Last year was complete failure. The only thing I accomplished was learning lessons on what not to do.
This year it worked and it feels like it worked from the start. I had originally planned on it being more humourous, but it ended up being black humour. My characters refused to stay caricatures, and started having more complex motivations. The chaotic road that I had kicked them down twisted and turned. The model for the book that I had in mind was “Snatch”, which I had watched while on one of my trips in October: a bunch of shady, flawed characters who happened to collide in a way that none of them could have predicted.
The only downside was that I really had to stretch the last act to reach 50,000 words. The basic narrative could have continued with another major plot twist, but that would have then shot it well past 50K which wasn’t what I wanted. It wasn’t that complex a story, just a short wad of chaos that ended as quickly as it started. Sort of like a house burning down. Sure, you could throw more logs on it, but why bother?
One of these days, I’m going to have to face the fact that I now have four complete first drafts of novels kicking around.
Good for you!! I’ve not known you to be short of words since you were two years old!! Love ya dear! Mom