Right now I'm hovering close to 40K, which makes me feel all sorts of accomplished. In fact, I'm scheduled to finish NaNo early (according to their awesome website calculator thingy), and plan on plowing through and finishing with as many words as I can.
But have my feelings changed since I first posted about it?
Meh.
I'm still on the fence.
Because I'm doing a re-write, I'm having all kinds of continuity issues going on with my new manuscript, and while under normal circumstances I'd go back and fix these things right away, I literally can't do that. NaNo is about production, plain and simple.
I suppose it would be like mining diamonds--without the forced labor, civil wars, blood, etc.--just get the diamonds out of the earth and we'll cut and polish them later.
And yes, that still drives me crazy. But that's why I wanted to do NaNo--because it's so different from my normal writing style. I used to hear (and still do) about authors who write a novel in two months, twelve weeks, three months, short periods of time like that. And I used to be jealous; how were these people able to write that much in such a short period of time and for them to be okay with the crappy first draft. But that's just it--it's a "crappy first draft." There's a saying amongst writers: "You can't fix a blank page." I don't know who said it, but it's true. If there's nothing down, you can't play with it. You can't pick a better word; you can't change the sentence structure; you can't change the POV. You need words on a page to do all of that, and I see their point.
I can already tell that I'll be doing more of the "get it down in the Word doc and fix it later" method after NaNo is over, but it'll be a mix of that and my usual too-meticulous (and often too slow) methods as well.
How about you? Is your attempt at NaNo going well? Why/why not?
xoxo Sarah
See, I don't believe that whole "you can't fix a blank page" thing. I do fix it. By putting words onto it. And I put the words there so that they need as little fixing later. I look at it more like building a house. You want to get it right the first time, because it's a real pain-in-the-butt to have to go back and fix the foundation once the house is up.
ReplyDeleteOh, I totally agree with you. That's why I'm usually so slow about it. But it's nice to know I'm capable of writing this way, too, and the more I get on the page now, the better I can see how it all fits together. :-)
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