I thought, at first, that I was going to finish the historical I had started (many) years before. In fact, I ended up polishing the existing sections for several months and wrote very little that was actually new.
Frustrated, I looked around for some inspiration, and on September 1, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The goal is to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. 1,667 words per day.
It scared me because, even though I had written books and articles before, I had no idea how many words they were. I simply wrote until it was done. Of course, that was non-fiction. Okay, they were technical manuals. This was the first time I had a deadline for my fiction -- other than the assignments for class.
The rules were fairly simple.
- it must be a work of fiction -- that's the whole point of this.
- we can have an outline, background on the characters, etc., but we cannot start writing until12:00:01 a.m. on November 1.
- it's on the honour system. As they say on the NaNo site: "since the only real prize of NaNoWriMo is the self-satisfaction that comes with pulling off such a great, creative feat, we don’t really worry too much about people cheating. Those who upload 50,000 words they copied from Wikipedia.org just to see their name on the Winner’s page are pitiful indeed."
- winners are determined by the online validation process on the NaNo website. The 50k word count must be validated by midnight on November 30 in order to be a winner.
So, the beginning of September saw me feverishly pounding away at an outline. I finished it in a couple of weeks and thought "well, that was fun, but what am I going to do between now and the beginning of November?" In order to maintain my excitement about the project, I decided to work up two more outlines so that, when the time came, I'd be able to choose whichever story appealed to me the most that particular day.
November 30, I had 54k+ words, but wasn't finished the story. Realising that a lack of deadlines were what had kept me from succeeding in finishing my fiction before, I went onto facebook and announced that I was going to finish the story by December 15.
Then I got my first paid editing contract in 4 years ... of course.
I still finished the rough draft -- at 11:40 p.m. on December 15. Then I went back and dealt with the questions I had entered as footnotes (so I could keep on writing). The first draft (that I would let anyone else see) was finished at 5 a.m. on December 24. Just in time to give it to a few close friends for Christmas.
The result was a novel that was 70k+ words. 245 pages, double spaced, Times 12.
So, I'm going to do it again this year.
More info can be found at http://www.nanowrimo.org
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