The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: NaNoWriMo

  • The Lackluster Finish

    I was really hoping to be able to make a sizeable dent in the bonus round this year.  That’s what I call any amount of words over 50,000.  I’ve never been able to write more than a few hundred words in the bonus round, which is a bit disappointing to me.  Heck, I even looked at a calendar, and picked my “from the trenches” day specifically so I could nab the 30th and talk about the bonus round.

    Come the end of the month, and it turns out I had to “cheat” and go rebel just to get anywhere close to finishing the 50k, let alone writing inside of the bonus round.

    Life.  What can you do?

    Maybe next year.

  • NaNo Rebellion

    I didn’t mean to end up as a rebel this year.  It just kinda… happened.  My first novel concept completely fell through, none of my backup ideas had enough substance to become a novel, and even my idea to write a mini-anthology of related short stories fell through.  I had to do something.

    So I ended up going back to one of my old NaNo projects.  The 2013 one, specifically.  Not a great year for my health, but it was my first year as ML, and the theme was that fantastic 8-bit setup.  I digress.  I’ve long felt it’s my most salvageable out of all of my manuscripts, and I’ve always meant to come back to it.  With nothing else to lose… here I am.

    (more…)

  • A little lost. A little found.

    Well, it’s day 20. Today we should all be crossing 33,300 words. I am not there and I won’t be for a while.

    Part of that is being hit by this virus that’s taken out half the writing group now. For three days last weekend I struggled to reach even 100 words a day. It took out some of the days that are traditionally my best catch-up days. And I fell further behind.

    Part of it is the week two blues, which have persisted into week three for me. The week two blues come with the absolute, gut wrenching belief that you have gone in the wrong direction. Somewhere along the way the plot you were writing stopped being the plot you were planning. You’re lost, you’ve ruined the novel, and nothing will ever be right again.

    In my non-writing time I travel to a lot of estate auctions in small towns around the area. I take an old-school approach to get to these. I print out directions from a map site and use them to get me close enough for the auction companies to draw me in with signs they put up. It’s nerve wracking following some back road I’ve never traveled on to some small town I’ve never visited and hoping to find a house or building that I’ve never set eyes on. I have to trust that the directions won’t lead me astray. And 99% of the time they get me there.

    But there’s often a point as I’m driving that I’m convinced I’m lost. That point where my directions say to follow this road for 5 miles, even though the road has forked and I’m not sure I took the right fork, and I’m way outside of town now, and did I just pass the county line? But I keep driving. Sometimes I keep driving because that’s the only choice and there’s nowhere to turn around just now. I keep driving because that’s the only way to find out if I’m lost. I drive a little further, and a little further, and eventually I’m there. With little auction signs to light my way.

    That’s something like noveling. I’m in that point in the novel that every writer seems to experience. My outline just took a major hit and needs to be reworked. My twist has revealed itself a full act too early. And I’m convinced that everything I’ve ever written is awful, even though I know this is categorically false. There are at least a few bits I like. Buried in there. Somewhere.

    The only way to know for sure whether or not I’ve broken the novel is to keep writing for a bit. It should come together in the next 10,000 words. Sometime soon I’ll have an epiphany to fix the third act. My character will find new and interesting ways to ruin her life. I just have to convince myself to keep writing so that we can find out. One word at a time. Until I can see the signs pointing me home.

  • NaNoWriMo, Week Three: Better/Worse

    It could be going better.

    By the end of today, wrimos ought to be at 30,000 words — more than halfway to the target word count. This is one of the ways in which I think NaNo is an imperfect system for new writers learning the trick of the novel.

    By NaNo standards, you’re more than halfway done. If you’re trying to complete the novel in 50,000 (which, your mileage may vary) you’ve finally zoomed out of the saggy middle, which is one of the things that slows us down in week two.

    But most novels come in between 60,000 and 90,000 words, depending on the genre and the writer. I read somewhere that Brian Sanderson’s Elantris is around 200,000 words while Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is just around 46,0001. So it’s not as though there’s a hard a fast rule. But at the same time, it can be hard to break out of the NaNo-set guidelines and learn better methods for structuring and putting together a novel. I think it’s also one of the reasons that a lot of people outgrow NaNo once they start writing outside of the confines of November.2

    This is a lot of navel-gazing about the length and nature of novels, and how the middle always drags, and where I’m aiming is this: I’m still at the plodding, sagging middle of the novel. Despite being firm into week three (my spirits should be rising!), I’m still living week two. I’m around 6,000 – 7,000 words behind par. And while things are slowly coming together in the novel, I’m worried I won’t meet my goal of winning again after several years of depression- and fatigue-induced failure, thus regaining the passion I had for writing before my life suddenly got Very Adult on me back in 2012.

    Hm.

    I didn’t realize it until I wrote it, but yep. That’s sort of the symbolic trophy at play here — the idea that having made real progress in many others parts of my life (most, I’d hazard to say), that all that’s left is to be at the place again where I was gleefully focused on my fiction and eagerly starting to reach for more.

    It could be going worse.

    I ran into a problem with the middle of my novel. At first it was an issue with my main character being passive. I struck out a scene, reworked it, and seemed to have a solid footing. I had a red herring, even — I hadn’t noticed it until that moment!

    But then I realized the real issue with the middle: there wasn’t anything to put there. I had an outline, but no plan to get from “Nora chooses to follow her mentor” to “the climax starts.” This isn’t Rocky — a training montage wasn’t going to fit the emotional tone of the novel. I didn’t have enough supporting characters or any substantial subplots to move through the middle. All the same, I’m determined to put real effort into this project and to win this year, so I forced my way through it bit by bit.

    And then, finally, I had That Moment when it comes together. The problem wasn’t a lack of supporting characters — I have several, actually. It’s just that I wasn’t thinking of them as functional to the story. They each had a role in getting Nora to the point where she’s chosen to follow through with Defeating the Antagonist even though she really doesn’t have the skill to do so. I had a whole cast in this novel. They just needed to be given roles to move the story.

    So now that I have all of the blocks to build the bridge from Act II to Act IV in the outline (according to an outlining method Christie taught us that is quite excellent), I have to go work on my third version of the outline to flesh out those roles. To figure out how all of these supporting characters fit in the new roles I’ve given them. Once I know how they work together (and, of course, also against each other) to meet the goals of the plot, I think the middle will probably move a lot faster.

    1. I’ve never read any Sanderson, even though I love his podcast work, but Adams is one of my favorite authors. So I can only personally vouch for the latter, and yeah. Hitch Hiker’s Guide is a short book.

    2. Outgrowing NaNoWriMo is like outgrowing a really great friendship — it sucks. This is my tenth year, but I don’t need it the way I used to. What I really needed, more than the impetus, was the culture of writers working toward common goal. As our writers’ group has evolved to be that year-round, NaNoWriMo has become less valuable to me. It’s… not a very good feeling.

  • The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Written

    I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2012, but I’m still reaping the writing rewards of that one year.

    My fiction before that NaNoWriMo had been mostly successful. All of my plays were awarded staged readings and most of my short stories got published. Of course, I had only written two plays and three short stories over the course of 11 years. Five things total. I was a 29 year old woman who had wanted to write fiction all my life, but I just didn’t do it.

    It would have been embarrassing to turn out something from my own imagination that was imperfect and less than brilliant. And so I didn’t write fiction. I wrote news articles, academic papers, and grant proposals successfully. After all I could write, but those weren’t pieces of my Very Own Personal imagination on display, so I felt less exposed.

    In 2012 I could see my 30th birthday approaching and I had always thought that I would have finished my first novel before I was 30. Still just the two plays and three short stories. So I jumped on the NaNoWriMo bandwagon.

    Writing for a word count taught me to just keep going. My novel was wretched. I did have a couple of moments of brilliant extemporizing that were exhilarating, especially so since I am an avid plotter and in no way shape or form a seat-of-your-pants writer. But mostly it was horrible.

    I found it freeing to have written something horrible. Whatever I wrote next couldn’t possibly be the worst thing I’ve ever written. Nope. That was my NaNo Novel. Crown taken.

    So, I have learned to keep going through painful stories, through half formed ideas, bad plots, weak characters, etc. I have decided that I can learn nothing from stories I don’t write. And so, whenever I can make time for my fiction hobby, I write. I’m getting better, too.

  • Surviving Another Week

    Wow, a lot has happened in a week. I celebrated my birthday with friends on Friday. Then pulled two 3k writing days. Yesterday I spent the day curled up in bed battling some sort of stomach bug. I’ll spare you the details, but safe to say it was pretty gross.

    I’ve been hovering around or slightly above par most days and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m not getting burnt out by writing 3k+ words every day. On the other hand, when I have days I fall behind that means I don’t have nearly as much buffer.

    My novel is starting to come together. Though I’m starting to worry that I don’t have enough material to make it stretch to 50k. Not without throwing in another subplot or three. I suppose this is where being a pantser starts to become problematic. Oops.

    Amelia nearly ran off to India this past week and was very narrowly talked out of it. Mainly because I did not want to write a novel about a several month long boat ride. I know very few nautical terms and would end up spending half of my writing time doing research. If you’re following along from last week, I am no closer to discovering if Amelia is or is not in love with her best friend.

    There’s still time though. At least, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

  • Week 1: What the Hell?! I’m behind already?!

    They call me the Terminator. It could be that when wearing sunglasses, I bear a slight resemblance to Schwarzenegger. God knows that we have the same muscular build that simultaneously inspires and intimidates.

    Well–that’s not true. They call me that because I sit and write without distraction. I always push forward, and I never miss my word count. So why, only a week after giving a speech about always being able to find the time to write, have I not found the time to write?

    There are a load of reasons and none of them are particularly good. I could point at work being busy, but work is always busy this time of year, and I haven’t been in for the last couple of days due to having some sort of sickness that started in sinuses head and has descended in to my lungs. I could blame it on being sick, but I’ve written while under the weather before. Hell, it is one of the best things about being a writer. You can work without risk of giving the plague to someone else.

    I could blame it on Penny, our new puppy. But really, why would you ever blame anything on a puppy? No, the truth of it is that I have failed for no good reason. The novel is coming along fine. I still have a lot of story ahead of me, and I know where I am going next. What I’ve written, I’ve done in two large chunks of over 3,000 words each, so the words are coming easily. I simply have not made enough time to work on this project, so far.

    This isn’t really a problem, not at this juncture. I will probably go for another 3,000 words or so today, which will put me only about a day behind schedule. This early in the month, it really isn’t that hard to make up for a few lazy days. It just takes a couple hundred extra words a day, hardly anything in he grand scheme of things.

    However, most people start off NaNoWriMo with a bang, charging forward and killing the majority of the first ten thousand words in just a few days. It’s generally a bad sign to be lagging behind already. That being said, I still believe I will make it to fifty thousand by the end of the month, as long as I make the time to write this book.

    I’ve just done a poor job of it, so far.

  • Cheering from the sidelines

    I am not doing NaNoWriMo, and it feels like I’m opting out of a big party in order to study or something. (more…)

  • On Using NaNoWriMo as Intended

    Welcome to the dawn of day four (of NaNoWriMo), and a new liveblogger! (Not new. You know me. I’ve been here forever.) Since you haven’t met my novel yet, let me start you off there:

    NaNoWriMo 2015, "The Departed Daugther," Ashley Hill
    I just really wanted to write about twilight sleep.

    There are a lot of things to say about the challenges of writing a story set in 1914 in a city I’ve never visited, but I think we’ll come to that next week. This week, let’s talk about what I really hope to get from this month.

    My goal this year has been developing a less frantic process, and that really culminates for me here during NaNo. In years past, I’d write and write and write until I was exhausted — and I’d be fried by the end of November. I wouldn’t work on anything for months, and tended to spend the rest of year poking my writing at a plodding pace. I’d say I had no ideas, and just resign myself to only being a NaNoWriMo writer.

    Two things are different about this year for me.

    The first was that I submitted a short story to a magazine and subsequently had my first short story published this summer. While I didn’t instantaneously become Ashley M. Hill, Extremely Serious Author, I did find myself thinking, Hey, maybe people could actually like what I write. So I’ve started to be tiny amount more serious with myself.

    The second was that I started keeping a checklist of my ideas when I had them. I use Google Keep, so that I have one note that is my checklist, and then write any additional notes in a different note when necessary. And as it turns out, I have a lot of ideas. They’re not all novel ideas, but they’re all stories to be told.

    I just have to get into the habit of telling them.

    So this year I’m working on writing to a logical stopping point, and then stopping when it feels right. Instead of forcing myself to keep going further and harder, I save my progress, log my word count, and do one of the many other tasks that fill my evenings. I have a lot of things to do with my day-to-day life. I have to make sure my son is taken care of half of the time. I need to meet my other, non-writing goals. Sometimes I want to read. My boyfriend recently bought me Don’t Starve for the PS3, and I need time to enjoy that.

    If I can do all of that stuff and only lose my mind once in a while, I can also find time to write.

    The teal deer version — I’m doing with NaNoWriMo this year what Chris Baty intended: finding out how being a writer can fit into my life filled with social stuff, family stuff, and a day job.

    (P.S. My stats are fine, if unremarkable. I ended day one with a buffer, and have written ~1600 words each day since, so I’m staying just ahead of the curve. I’m usually at about 1.25 par for the day.)

  • Starting Out Strong

    Hello! Welcome to day three of NaNo. Everything’s going well so far. However, I’ve spent far too much time looking up one random fact or another that I think I might have to throw in the towel and admit I shouldn’t be a pantser. Then again, I think even if I better planned my novel, I would still be googling “Regency House Names” because if there is one thing I remember from regency romance novels, it’s that every house has a name.

    Hey Ashley–you’re a house now. Hope that’s cool.

    I’m trying out a new genre for NaNo. Typically I write fantasy geared toward young adults. In fact, two of my NaNo wins have been in this genre. The one time I deviated from it I had a ton of fun but ultimately hated the end product. Then again, I wrote in a genre I don’t read. This year I’m at least sticking with something I enjoy. Regency romance novels are my guilty pleasure. I can chew through several in an afternoon. In fact, in preparation for my new novel I spent a week with my nose buried in the spines of one of my favorite authors. (more…)