As it turns out I was able to average 2,500 words a day – and that’s despite taking every Sunday off and the whole of last weekend. There was a definite buzz to get through the initial parts and breathe life to the characters that had so far just been plainly drawn on a note page.
This final week has been the most difficult, hammering out the last three chapters. I realised that although I had all the chapters outlined I had the first two thirds of the novel with a fair bit more of an outline than the rest and when I finished Chapter 11 I felt a definite slump in my spirits. I realised I needed to re-plan the last section as well as re-think the logistics of which characters would be where and why. A lot of that re-planning happened at 2am when I was lying in bed.
I also started to get tired out and ran thin on ideas to spice up dialogue and scenes. There are a lot of ‘the man looked at the wall’ type descriptions which I’ve just had to plough through and convince myself I would somehow be able to jazz up in the 2nd or 25th edit.
Now I will lay the thing to rest until after Xmas. I’m sure ideas will pop up before I pick it up again – in fact I’m counting on them to breathe a bit more life into the dull corners. I’ll make some notes when they happen and dust the tome down in January at some point to do the reread with a big red pen before I start typing draft 2.
Then it will be a ‘rinse and repeat’ of parking the novel and picking it up again a few weeks later to prune with a (hopefully) fresh head on my shoulders.
It has been a brilliant experience, all in all. I loved being able to take a day off work to just sit in a café for almost 4 hours. I think I’d like to make this an annual challenge, whatever comes of it. It’s nice to be able to focus my mind on the writing. I do have five books provisionally planned (yeah, I know…don’t start) – but this time I have figured out a half decent ending to the lot of them. It’s just filling out some of the blanks along the way that I’ve had to attend to.
I’d like to share more about the plot, but I want to make sure it’s all properly sorted before I go ahead with that. Now, the only other person who knows what’s going on (or at least as much as he can keep up with – draft one is ‘a tad’ overcomplicated) is my 7-year-old son. That’s been a great treat to be able to read a chapter to him every couple of nights. I’ve had some reluctance and always had to warn him that it isn’t the definitive version, but he’s been great about it and happy to point out my grammatical errors along the way (bless him)…!
What I will tell you is that it’s ended up being a sort of mix of Narnia, Harry Potter and His Dark Materials with a smattering of Lovecraft and a tiny bit of ‘The Thing’. The overriding theme popped out of it when I reached the halfway point. It’s a story about trust, with a protagonist who struggles with that. Plus, it has one great friendship that rises above all the ordeals that take place. I really have enjoyed getting this far with it and I hope one day I’ll get it into a good enough shape for you to enjoy as well.
These are the things that got me through the month:
- Fantastic Support from my family letting me go off and noodle about in various cafes.
- The motivational speeches from Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman that they provided to NaNoWriMo.
- The NaNoWriMo target and daily word counting themselves.
- A lovely selection of 80’s music that I’ve played every day that I’ve written (although now I really need to get back to the present).
- Red Dead Redemption 2 to help me unwind and shoot bad guys most evenings.
Cheers all!