About that NaNoWriMo Thing...

So during November I got this crazy idea to participate in NaNoWriMo.  Actually, I arrived at the decision at around 10 pm on Halloween, and then hovered around my computer for the rest of the night waiting for the stroke of midnight so I could get going.  I spent the month slaving away over my laptop keyboard in an attempt to complete the seemingly impossible task of writing 50,000 words of a novel in just 30 days.  But I did it!

As luck would have it, I had outlined a story a few months ago, so I had a plot and characters and setting ready and waiting to go.  I've never done anything like this before, so I handled it exactly the way anyone who knows me would expect me to.  I printed out my detailed outline, character sketches, location descriptions, and lists of strong action verbs and adjectives, and put them all in a binder with color-coded tabs and a whole bunch of loose leaf paper.  Really, the only downside was the fact that the loose leaf was wide ruled instead of college ruled.  I somehow managed to persevere, though, despite a nearly tragic mishap with a spilled water bottle in my work bag that left the bottoms of the papers slightly crinkly (and nearly claimed the life of my phone).

I'm a month behind on most of my tv shows and my reading of The Hobbit in preparation for watching the movie ground to a halt, but I hit 50,000 words on November 28th, two whole days early.  Then I promptly went out and bought myself a Slurpee.  Because I deserved it.

This story still has a long way to go.  I have close to 50 chapters sketched out and I finished November somewhere in the middle of the 10th.  I don't know if I'll ever get around to finishing it (or if I'll ever actually show it to anyone), but it was nice to get the words that had been rattling around in my head out onto paper. It was also fun to have a sense of purpose for the first time in a while.  Maybe that'll be what keeps me going.  I am, of course, taking a writing break.  I've got a whole load of craft ideas that I've been waiting to work on, and a lot of hours of tv to catch up on.  I like to think that it won't take long for me to get back to writing.

NaNoWriMo Away!

I've been aware of National Novel Writing Month for a couple of years now.  I'll admit that the first time I saw a Twitter friend mention it, I thought the idea was a little bit crazy.  This year, however, I decided to dive in.  I tossed the idea around for a few days as I saw other people on Twitter talking about making their preparations and last night, two hours before it kicked off, I decided to register and make a go of it.  I figured that if I was ever going to do something like this, now would be the time.  I'm absurdly underemployed and almost completely lack what most twenty-somethings would describe as a social life.  Now, I know that you're thinking, "But Kris, shouldn't you be writing your novel instead of writing about writing your novel?"  And the answer to that question would be a resounding yes.  However, anyone who would ask me that clearly lacks appreciation for my extraordinary powers of procrastination.  It's all a part of the creative process.

I started writing at midnight and made it through 858 words before I decided to call it quits for the night at 1:30 am.  I can always tell when I'm too tired to continue writing because my phonics start to get wonky as I type.  It's not pretty; as a grammar elitist, it's a point of pride that I get some sleep and come back to the computer when I'm rested enough to continue properly.

I'll be honest: I kind of hate what I have written so far.  I've always been a good writer, but I've almost exclusively written academic papers.  Creative storytelling is something that's more or less new to me.  I think it'll get better after I power through this opening chapter and move on to the characters that I really like.  I have a feeling that it's just a matter of finding my own writing voice and figuring how to put the images in my head down onto paper.  It's definitely a different process than pounding out a thesis statement and some analytic paragraphs.  I need to convince myself to write the novel my own way, not try to make it perfect or fit into some preconceived notion of what it should look like.