I have been taking to writing on the deck behind our house. We set up a type of gazebo (one with metal poles and canvas that you can take down) this summer so I will sit out there to write. Usually, during NaNoWriMo I can get quite a bit of writing on my commute to work, but with COVID there is no longer a commute, so the deck is my solution, at least until it gets too cold to type.
//i\\First couple of days working on the all new bits of the screenplay have gone very well. I am on track for 100 pages, which is way longer than I normally end up with for a first draft. Most places say 90-100 pages is what you should aim for, and I’m usually lucky if I get 70. It will all be tweaked and tightened in subsequent drafts anyway.
We’re halfway through the month, anybody dropped out yet?
Late to the party as usual, I am doing it again this year. I’ve won all but one year when I’ve participated properly and I’m currently at 32K words although I’ve not added to the story today. Things are not going quite as planned although the words keep coming so I’m happy to just keep going. It’s not going to be a completed tale by any stretch, none of mine have ever been fully finished as I’m just doing it for fun, and this year for added distractions from all the crap going on around me.
I haven’t been able to write consistently, but I continue to accumulate small chunks of text.
I haven’t, but I’m about out of ideas and the power to finish.
I’m currently at 10,027 words. I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety and depression this month and I’m finding it hard to think through my plot line. I can picture it, in a big-picture sense, but I’m having trouble filling the gaps and advancing the story from scene to scene. Right now I have little bits from different places in the book written out, and most of them are not joined together in any way. Right now I just don’t know how to expand on what I have and tie it together.
I have no idea how much I’ll be able to add.
Dropped out is too strong for where I am, but it’s definitely got that I’ll start my diet on Monday feeling.
Not many days left…
So far this month has been a catastrophic failure in the writing department, and we lost power Sunday just to make it even worse. I’ve been schlepping stuff and a baby to a hotel room all day. Then the power came on so we’ve schlepped it all back. Baby is unphased but Mom and Dad have had a day, let me tell you.
However - a moment of good news. When I couldn’t sleep last night, the final climactic scene came to me, fully realized, and I had the good sense to write it down in as much detail as I could before I went to sleep. I also spent time working on an earlier scene I’m thinking about including. So my finale is now waiting to be written. That’s something. It’s a lot, actually, because I was really stuck.
My daughter is currently in her room writing. She has just passed 31.5K. She has “won” the last three years. She has a number of readers of her fanfic writing that she does when not in November. Just hoping that someday her writing turns into real money for her.
Even though I’m writing a screenplay, and not a novel, and also completing an unfinished draft, I estimate the extra stuff I’ve written over the past fortnight has also been around 10,000 words.
When I export it to PDF, which I do each time just to get a page count, it’s currently at 88 pages. This is used as a handy guide, measured as one page = one minute of screen time, should it be imagined to get made. Most recommend somewhere between 90-100 pages is where to aim for, so I’m still on track.
I think I’ll link to the PDF when it’s done at the end of the month, in case anybody wants to read it.
That’s great! I always mention to my kids that I am participating and I hope that as they get older they will join in as well. I tried to probe if their school had any classrooms participating but it did not seem to be the case. Maybe next year?
//i\\Huzzah. Good writing things happened last night and I am reminded about the evening writing habit I used to have. I start digging in around 10pm and write until midnight or later.
I wasn’t writing the ending scene I came up with. I was working on a scene I may or may not include. Basically my male protagonist does something pretty awful to the female protagonist at the start of the novel, and then he spends a good chunk of the book feeling bad about it. Since they later become lovers, it’s always bothered me that there was no explicit accountability for him. Romance heroes get away with so much terrible shit without ever having to be accountable, so I wanted to work in some very real ramifications and true accountability. It’s hard to do, however, without it sounding like a Very Special Moment. I try to write with some modicum of subtlety and having to abandon that for the sake of this scene may mean the scene has to be scrapped. It’s definitely a murder your darlings dilemma, because I have some good writing in there that’s hard to part with.
But a part of me is like, who cares? I’m having fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve had fun writing. I spent a couple hours today working on that scene as well and as soon as I’m done working I want to continue.
Enjoy!
I didn’t think I was going to write today. Due to home life things, it sort of felt like the opportunity wouldn’t arise. But things got sorted sooner than I expected, and I not only wrote, I finished!
End Of Draft One
And I really like it! 100 pages exactly, and looking pretty snazzy!
Tomorrow I start on Draft Two, which will be going over all of it again, improving all the descriptions, seeding in some things that will matter later, tweaking dialogue, expanding scenes, reducing scenes, cutting scenes, and generally fixing what’s broken.
As they say, it’s easier to fix something you have, than to create from scratch. I’ve done the hard bit, now this is the easy bit.
WOOT! Hooray for first drafts.
I wish I could say editing was the easy bit for me. That’s when I get obsessive, and take, oh, six years to finish my novel.
Ya’ll, I have written over six hours today and I finished rewriting the end of my novel. I have some more edits to do, but nothing painful. If I keep it up I will have a final, agent-worthy draft by the end of the month.
Back to work!
7.5 hours today!
Great work!
Another few hours today. My progress is slowed a bit, because the final plot chunk I need to edit has been a bit difficult to figure out. Plus I got distracted reading all the scenes and snippets I cut from the novel, and man, were they bad. It’s interesting to see how my writing has improved over the years, not just technically but in terms of how I present conflict and what character choices I make. When I started this novel it was FULL of melodrama, and I developed it over time into a cohesive narrative. I look at the old stuff and go, “Why did I ever think that would work?”
So that’s good, I guess.
I haven’t written anything in a few days. Clearly I’m not going to hit 50k words. I’ll be lucky at this point to do another 10k on top of what I have already.
But is it more than you otherwise would have done? Because that’s something.