Friday, November 23, 2012

NANO is rumbling to a close

HEYO!  So here we are again!  Woo.  My National Novel Writing Month novel is rumbling to a close and I am more than a little bit relieved but also more than a little bit sad because I utterly screwed this novel up.  Poor little novel.  This is a squeal to the first novel I wrote which is essentially about choosing death and dispair.  It kind of put a close for me on a lot of the ways I felt and while it didn't come easily it did get written.  This novel I am writing now is about choosing life, but also tyranny of life.  The problem is that I didn't convey this very well.  There are a few reasons for this.  The cast is unusually large for me and disparate.  I have the ending pretty well planned but not the start or the middle which has caused some pretty signifigant problems.  Most importantly I didn't do a very good job developing my themes.  The biggest problem is that I just plain old don't write enough.  If I want to be better I need to practice more it is as simple as that.  Writing here doesn't count I mean honest to goodness fiction.  So I am not sure what I want to do with all this information.

I do want this book to work.  However, I am going to have to rip it all apart and rewrite most of it down to a fundamental level.  I'm okay with that.  I might end up doing it next year for nano or I might hunker down during the summer sometime and do it then.  That would be pretty cool.  Either way in the condition it is now the book needs some serious repair work and the first step to making any of that viable is by writing more fiction plain and simple.  So that will start happening.  Some nice light fiction chumklets here and there some longer stories stuff like that.  I also want to do some more rpg writing and other things.  Luckily I broke down the stigma of doing writing in my house so that's pretty good and I've hit a stride so that banging out 2500 words a night isn't so bad.  I take a break every 1000 words or so and it works out pretty nicely.  All in all this has been a good experience.  I've learned a lot about my writing process, the type and amount of prep work I need to do in order to be sucessful, I got better at dealing with distractions, and managing my time.  What I didn't do is produce a novel that I liked and I am pretty much okay with that.  NaNoWriMo is pretty much about everything else for me.  The novel itself is secondary.

So that's that.  In a couple of days I'll hit word count.  I can pretty much wrap up the plot at any time I want to but that's the thing.  There is still a lot to be done.  I definitely need to develop an ecconmy of space when it comes to my fiction writing but like I said more practice. 

Ultimately, I am not so sure why I stopped fiction writing.  I used to do it all the time.  I had those little note books I carried around with me and I filled three of them up.  Then somewhere along the line it all just stopped.  Being to busy in school at one point is very much a factor.  Then not being in school at all is another just as big factor.  The biggest thing though is that for the most part we do as we please.  The rest it just excuses.  Time to find out what I am using as an excuse to stop me from writing and fix it.  No biggie.

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