I don’t feel uninspired, but I am writing in the systematic fashion you describe. I wouldn’t be able to keep everything straight if I jumped around alot. In addition, what if I had a bunch of stuff for later in the novel and then find that I’ve written myself into a corner? (Or into a coroner!)
I sure can. I get down lots of words and then do a quick run through to get rid of the egregious stuff. Seems to work okay.
I’m above 13,000 and it’s day seven, which means that I’m ahead of the game until midnight, when I’ll be needing 14,000.
I just decided to write a completely different. It’s going to be this spirit (or soul, if you’d rather) who finds a building with only an elevator. It’ll have 100 floors, each floor representing a year of a man’s (or woman’s, haven’t decided yet) life. The spirit will go about looking in on different floors, until at the end where he’ll press one of the buttons that goes beyond the “main character’s” lifespan. Then, we shall find out what the spirit’s fate is.
I’m really enjoying the small-town secrets that are popping up all over my novel. Originally, it was just going to be kind of an Anne Rice-meets-Arrested Development kind of crazy family, but now there’s apparently a dead guy in a trunk in the attic, an uncle who’s only faking crazy so he doesn’t have to leave the hospital and get a real job, and it’s entirely possible that V.C. Andrews managed to mess with my plot when I wasn’t looking and made my MC’s grandparents half-siblings.
On the other hand, I have a lawyer nicknamed Counselor Weeble and a poor misguided bloodhound with a face full of fish hooks. Maybe I shouldn’t put a limit on utter ridiculousness until I figure out how poor Deputy Carmichael ended up behind the bowling alley in a bunny suit.
After two 500 word days, I went out yesterday, sat in a cafe, and made myself write. I came home, checked it, and had done 3000+ words (yes) so, I’m caught up. Plus, I really liked what I wrote yesterday. It did not suck. This book might actually be worth editing in March.
I had set a goal to hit 10K by Sunday night, and Sunday morning I was 3K behind. I wrote a measly 1200 and almost called it a night. Then inspired by a local WriMo’s post, I decided to throw my internal editor out the window and go for it.
What I ended up with was my first-ever sex scene, which I wouldn’t let myself finish until I hit 10K. That made it so much fun, intensified the scene and the writing experience by prolonging the sex. I don’t know how it happened, but it turned out to be really pivotal to the story -and- the most fun I’ve had yet with this project.
Only, it’s hard to start again today, now that all of the characters have just been in one of two intense scenes. Seems like anything I do now is anti-climactic.
I was getting worried that my plot was progressing too fast and I wouldn’t have enough material to get to 50,000 words, but my plot decided to winter a storm with a family I didn’t know about, so that has heartened me a bit. I love it when my plot runs away with me. I’m doing okay on word count, though I had to push my goal back a day. But thats okay, cause I set my goal with a buffer at the end so I could push it back when I needed to.
I’m using the notecard method for plotting, and now I’ve gotten my plot developed and a paragraph (or more) describing each scene… yay! This is my first time doing this, and I am having a TON of fun with it. I have 40 scenes altogether, and if I write two a day, I’ll hit my mark just a couple of days shy of November 30th. Man, I hope it goes as planned.
I have 3,659 words, and the story is finally starting to roll…
And I’m too scared to look back. It feels good as I type it, but I know when I read it in December, I’m going to be going, “WTF, Stasia? Seriously, what were you thinking??”
But right now, it feels brilliant, so I’m going to roll with that.
Finally getting back to writing for the first time in a week. 5498 words as of this moment.
I tell myself that if the Cen-Truck THRILLOGY consists of 3 movies, each one is 16666 words. Each movie has three acts, or 5555 words per act. What that tells me is that I’m just about to wrap up act one of the first movie, in which we have the introduction of Cen-Truck.
Soon he’ll go off and be a vigilante and stuff, and pull over speeders, you know, and stuff like that, until he meets his nemesis - the EVIL BLACK TRUCK - and then bam, act three, climax! If I can wrap that up by the weekend I can be back on track to pump out the second and third movie.
I’ve even finalized the villains for those next two. I’m starting to fly – I was only at 2400 words this afternoon and those were all written on Nov 1. I was seriously thinking about packing it in, but I just needed to find my voice.
I hit a mental block after reaching 10,000 on Saturday. I’ve only written 2000 since then and it’s mostly a few half-finished scenes. I’ve discovered I’m really bad at describing things in detail. Tomorrow I will catch up! (Because maybe if I type it, it will come true.)
Every time I turn around, something changes on me. First the house is haunted in my head, then it’s not, then it is, and I have to go back and insert haunty things in the first six chapters, and now it’s still haunted, but the ghosts don’t really have anything to do with the story.
Except for the ghost of the main character’s father, whose body was originally hidden in the attic, but while awaiting discovery apparently managed to move to a shallow grave behind the garage, because a thirty-year-old corpse in a Louisiana attic probably would have been discovered way before it was thirty years old, even if nobody ever goes into the attic, anyhow. Now the poor bastard’s gonna get himself dug up by an inquisitive puppy nobody’s bought yet.
There also appears to be a small section setting up a visit by my MC’s former fiance, but I don’t think I’ve got enough room to fit him in between Uncle Danny’s escape from the mental hospital (he does it every couple weeks, tools down the hill in his wheelchair, and somebody in the family’s got to go pick him up at the liquor store and return him to the loony bin) and the discovery of all the information hidden away by Daisy the Octogenerian Secret Agent (containing half the town’s skeletons and a great deal of information that will make my MC’s life a whole lot different). It’s too bad I probably can’t fit the fiance in … I was planning for the MC to have Daisy tail him for his whole visit, just to annoy him …
I’ve become as crazy as my characters, I believe. It’s kinda fun. 21,000 words and counting.
Hehehe. I realized today that Devin misses her kitten Buttons now that her adopted parents have unceremoniously shipped her back to the real father she didn’t know she had. Of course, Buttons needs to be written into the earlier parts of the story.
I’m feeling blue because I’m 1100 words behind where I want to be. I’ve got a feeling that things will progress more once I stop changing all the minor characters names. Or leaving extra spaces where name should go…“Devin glanced at and said” is a disheartening.
This whole thing is getting weird. Some stuff from my novel has started happening to me. Numerous coincidences converging in real life. I’m beginning to wonder whether the creepy parts of my story will start happening too. :eek:
Maybe I should go write in Mr. Right in really good detail.
Well, I’m at about 5k words, which is 10k words behind where I should be.
Yay!
Why Yay? Because this morning I had ZERO words. Being 10k behind is much, much better than being 15k behind.
How do I know? Because my handy-dandy NaNo spread sheet tells me my projected finished date has zipped from Sept 2 2043(!) all the way to January 31, 2006.
Wow. Finishing within not just the right decade, but the right year!
Alright, I have a question of sorts… perhaps more of a request for some advice.
I’m normally a little dense when it comes to picking up on symbolism, so I’m worried that my attempts at it in the story might be a little heavy handed. What I’m attempting to do is equate the protagonists eventual corruption of mind (or heart or morality or spirit, however you want to look at it) with the “corruption” of snow.
That is, when it first falls it’s white and clean and smooth and make even ugly things look pretty, but as people walk on it and drive through it it turns to slush and mush and eventually a black, ugliness. I want to draw parallels between the state of the snowfall and the mindset of the protagonist, using the new snow to show his “virginity” and the eventual blackness and ruination to his own corruption. I guess what I’m looking for are maybe some tips on how to go about that while being sure not to beat a reader over the head with it.
Just mention the state of the snow twice - probably him seeing it once at the beginning when it’s clean, then late in the story he notices that it’s been trampled on. As tempting as it is to spell things out for people, symbolism works best when you don’t force the issue by having the characters wax on about what it means to them but let readers figure it out on their own instead.
