NaNoWriMo 2012: The End

At this stage in the novelling game, I don't anticipate my last scene to be followed by the words 'The End'. It would certainly be nice and neat but, for a story about second chances, it wouldn't work to close with so much finality. Nevertheless, a few days ago, I was sorely tempted to write those two little words at the bottom of the page for, after a month of NaNoWriMo, I had reached The End.

Progress throughout the month: a little hit and miss

As can been seen above on the Bar Chart of Joy, this year's Nano has not been particularly smooth sailing. In fact, I became severely stranded on three occasions both for pleasant reasons - a trip to Amsterdam, the visit of a friend - and a thoroughly unpleasant one - being struck down by an evil time and energy-guzzling illness. Sabotaged by my own body! It was a bit of a struggle, more so than I anticipated, but I did manage to claw back my word count over the last few days and finally finish - hurrah!

Now, after a few days of hardly thinking about writing at all, I think a kind of debrief is probably due on the experience, for which I've come up with the following:

1) The first draft is complete
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, I have finished it, just like Joss Whedon told me to. It might be in a complete state, but it's all there, and therefore far easier to work with than a load of blank pages.

2) I have a better grip on the story
I have written this story over several years with months and months going by between bursts of activity. Returning to the plot in such a concentrated way has allowed me to see what works (the settings, for one) and what doesn't (the lack of emotional payoff at the end is currently my biggest concern), and therefore what I need to work on...

3) I have a plan
... Which leads me to the future of the book. I love to organise, and writing is one of those glorious activities that almost always benefits from a healthy dose of planning. It was always inevitable then, that as I was typing furiously to the deadline, my mind would be on the next stage of the process. I already know that the first thing I'm going to amend in the New Year is the opening of the story, which will take place in a completely different location (a wood) and then I'm going to tackle the rewrite chronologically, ie separating out my interlinking 2005/2010 timelines in the hope that I can smooth over all my plot holes and straighten out all my story arcs.

So finishing Nano is not an end - far, far from it. But the point is it's not a beginning either. To quote the mighty Joss once more:

Finishing [...]is first of all truly difficult, and secondly really liberating. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know you’re gonna have to go back into it, type to the end. You have to have a little closure.

Which is why, to myself, and only in relation to the first draft, I think I can say it just this once:

The End.

This is the first and last time a post will feature
more than one graph. Promise.

NaNoWriMo 2012: Preparation

As of tomorrow, I'll be taking part in Nanowrimo. To prepare, I have done the following:

1) Read through the existing manuscript
As previously mentioned, my Nano challenge this year is to finish my incomplete novel, at least in first draft. In an attempt to try and remember what on earth was going on in the story, I recently skimmed through everything I had written so far. Surprisingly, I didn't hate it. I didn't exactly love it either, but that's okay.

2) Made a plan
I love planning. If I could get a job plotting books and not writing them, that would be marvellous. Recently, my Geneva writers' group indulged this perversion of mine by promising we could have a 'structure clinic' at some point in the near future, whereby we all help one another put our stories into some sort of order. For me, this is painfully exciting - sort of like a literary Christmas - although I have realised I should probably make a plan for my own Nano project, if I'm going to be bossy about everyone else's.

3) Signed up
Nano has an excellent website, featuring lots of tips and banter, where you can design yourself a fancy profile, with pictures and a novel synopsis and everything. Mine is now up and running here. My favourite thing by far on the Nano website is the Bar Chart of Joy. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than watching the bar chart of my word count go up and up during the month of November - just as nothing fills me with as much dread as getting behind and watching the projected word count get further and further out of reach.

My Novel profile as of 01/11/12 - featuring the Bar Chart of Joy

4) Spread the word
During previous Nanos, I've found it best to tell my nearest and dearest that I'm attempting a novel in thirty days, just so they know why I look so hollow-eyed/unwashed/confused by reality. Better yet is to get them to do it as well. Long ago (May) I made a pact with Miss Joely Badger that we would both do Nano this year. And then there's my Geneva writers' group, some of whom may be attempting it too. As I said in my previous post on collaborative writing: share the writing burden!

5) Tidied my flat
I am notoriously messy and will neglect housework for weeks and weeks on end if I can get away with it (considering my 'studio apartment' in Geneva is probably only slightly larger than a shoe box, this is rather shaming). But when one is in the throes of novel-writing, scrubbing the bathroom often begins to look like an appealing alternative to writing, so that particular procrastination path has been nipped in the bud.

6) Bought a lot of food

The 'Inspiration Station'
- complete with novelty lighting

I work long hours and the aforementioned minuscule apartment has a kitchen which is literally inside a cupboard. This makes me a very lazy cook. I don't even really try: pasta and pesto has become my go-to supper (and believe me, I go to it a lot). However, novelists need nourishment - and Nano novelists cannot afford to be wasting time wandering the supermarket aisles every day. Therefore I have bought myself all sorts of healthy food: smoothies! Bananas! Broccoli! I can't remember the last time I ate broccoli, and I'm not convinced I can recall what to do with it.

7) Bought a lot of booze
As above, but more so.

8) Got in the mood

I've been working on my poor nameless novel for a long time now. Almost five years, in fact. As such, I have a pretty good idea of who will star in the inevitable film adaptation (Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Julianne Moore), what the soundtrack will feature (Israel 'Iz' Kamakawiwo'Ole's Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Portishead's Numb, among others) and have even built up an 'Inspiration Station' of random pictures vaguely connected to the story, so I can't accidentally forget I'm supposed to be writing it. In addition to reading through the manuscript, I have revisited these bookish bonus features - and am now officially In The Mood To Write.

Soundtrack music: Israel 'Iz' Kamakawiwo'Ole's 

version of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'

Three Steps Forward

At the risk of sounding like one of those ‘Review of the Year’ programmes (you know the sort: they splice together footage of mildly interesting events from the past twelve months and invite d-listers with nothing better to do to tell us how very fascinating/funny/tragic/unacceptable it all was) I’m going to try and summarise my year in writing. For I’ve neglected this blog for six months and, certainly writing-wise, rather a lot has happened.

I’ll start with my writer’s group, WOW (Writers on Wine). For the first half of the year, it was an enormously encouraging way to get stuck into the first big edit of my novel – and an opportunity to read some fabulous work by my contemporaries. Sadly, the WOW members are now somewhat scattered, with Lizzie and I having both moved away from Edinburgh, and I miss those evenings very much – both creatively and socially. However, I hope that one day we can share stories and drinkies once more, and until then I cannot thank my girls enough for giving my novel a good kick up the arse

Yes, I’ve moved from Edinburgh, which was a wrench - a huge wrench, in fact. I lived in Edinburgh for exactly four years, during which I made wonderful friends, had wonderful experiences and, for the first time, felt like a real writer. Yet when I was offered the Literary Consultant job in Geneva (a freelance version of which I have been doing for a year or so beforehand) it came at the perfect time. The UK seems to be full of doom and gloom at the moment, especially in employment terms, so it wasn’t too hard, deciding to escape to the land of Toblerones and cuckoo clocks to be paid to write.

As though I didn’t have enough on my proverbial plate with a new job, the move to a new country and trying to master a new(ish) language (how I can be so criminally bad at French after five years of it at school, I have no idea) I decided to do National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again in November. As strange as it might sound, I don’t particularly like the writing part of constructing a story. I love the ideas stage, I enjoy tinkering around with a text once it’s on the screen, I adore scrolling through a lengthy document and marvelling over how many words I’ve written, but actually bashing out the first draft… meh. I can take it or leave it. The advantage of Nano, in which you have to do a ‘barf draft’ of 50,000 words in a month, is that the initial writing part is over nice and quickly. In a year of scribbling that has felt quite serious at times, with editing my novel and doing a Proper Grown Up Writing Job, Nano gave me the opportunity to pen a silly story about dancing, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

So there they are: three steps forward, no steps back. Never one to be completely satisfied, I would have liked to have done something a bit more substantial with my novel… But hey, there’s always next year.