And don’t worry, this will undoubtedly be my last NaNo-related entry…until next year.

Doing NaNoWriMo this year was a blast. I mentioned it to a couple of friends on October 31, thinking, Maybe I could do some writing…but fifty thousand words? That’s a lot of pages. (Many people on the NaNo boards are in shock because they wrote 100 pages of text, and my first reaction is, You didn’t use manuscript format, did you? I had 240 pages.)

I don’t know when it became apparent to me that I was really going to go for the whole fifty thousand word kit and kaboodle. Sometime in the first ten thousand words I realized that I had to throw out the outline I was so carefully working on. Why? I don’t know. There have been many debates on Wordplay on the utility of outlines. Terry and Ted and other pros recommend them highly. I can totally understand why they are a crucial part of screenwriting. So why didn’t my outline work for me? A couple of reasons, I expect:

1. I wasn’t outlining the right way for me—I was doing it in too clinical and detached a fashion. Scene 1, scene 2, scene 3. Instead, if I wanted to do an outline, I think I’d have to start by telling myself a story (“Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted to steal a jewel, and the five Feds who wanted to stop her”) and flesh it out that way.
2. I also think outlines may work better for screenplays than for novels. Having a tight story is absolutely crucial in a screenplay: forget page count, you only have so much screen time, and everything has got to count. In a novel, though, you can meander a little more. Yes, I believe you’ve got to have structure in a novel. You just don’t have to get there right now or the audience is out buying popcorn.
3. I got very much caught up in the “get words out, any damn words” frenzy, which produced, as it is wont to do, some very weird words. I had a vague idea who the killer was going to be, but once I dreamt some of this stuff up I realized that having that person be the killer wasn’t going to work.

I haven’t gone back to read what I have at the moment—I think I’ll let it rest for a bit—but I know one thing: it’s given me text to work with, and a story to go after.

One of the most popular complaints of the writer is that the next idea seems so much more attractive than the one you’re working on now, and this is totally true: it always does. Of course, everyone always wants to drop the one they’re working on at this moment and go on to the next one, which is a bad idea. Why? Because the next one is going to have the same problems as this one does. The current one is real and extant and horribly flawed and little mutant, whereas the next one still exists in a state of perfection in your mind. Anyone can dream about the perfect next project. It’s getting the current project into good shape that’s important.

Rewriting doesn’t scare me the way it used to. I used to think, I got it out once, now I’ll just tweak it. Now I rev up the chainsaw and say, Where do we start? It’s just words. I can always produce more words.

One of the best things this NaNo exercise did for me was force me to write big and long. I have a tendency to write spare, which doesn’t happen to be a kind of fiction writing I particularly enjoy reading. I don’t want to be rushed through things, I want to find out what’s going on. It’s pretty clear where the spare writing comes from, of course: it’s helpful if you can write short and pithy in a screenplay. Not so much in fiction. I would rather write long and wordy and then cut down than figure out where to bulk up in later drafts.

I’m not at all surprised I came in “short” (at only 50,000 words!)—my first full-length screenplay came in short too. I’ve never had that problem again. Writing longer began to feel good during this past month.

Anyhow: doing this was an exercise I recommend highly. I am totally doing this again next year.

Yay me!

The NaNo Progress Meter site seems to have disappeared, so I will post totals here throughout the day.

9:45am: 47672 words, 2400 to go. This seems entirely possible. Even though I still don’t know whodunnit.

10:00am: 48001/1999.

11:15am: 49121/879+ to go. It would have been a while ago, except from 10 to 10:30 I played Spaceward Ho. (Why? Why do I do that? In the middle of writing, gotta go play a game. What’s up with that?) In other news: I now know whodunnit! Which requires me to put in a lot more stuff to set it up! Which should take care of those 879+ words no problem! The only down side is that I have to go pick up the kids soon and I won’t get a lot of writing done once that happens until Darin comes home tonight.

11:30am 49341/659+: Awk! I have no steam! Part of this is having already done 2500 words this morning, sure, but I could be done. But the end is in sight. What’s going on? The whole “And then they get run over by a truck” thing is looking more and more appealing by the second.

11:50am 49653/347+: A little over a page to go, but I have to run out and go get the kids. Maybe Simon will fall asleep on the ride home from school and Sophia can be talked into watching a show so I can finish up!

2:07pm 49963/37+: And I have to get Sophia to her dance class! But I can clearly do 40 words before midnight tonight. Unless I fall into a coma from exhaustion the way I seem to be threatening to (didn’t I get sleep last night? what’s going on?).

I have about 3000 words to go now, and about one day to do them in. If you’d asked me on October 31 what I would think of writing 3500 words in a day, I would have said, Are you nuts? but pretty much my take on it now is Piece of cake. I guess I shouldn’t get too cocky. After all, I have 3500 words to go and I still don’t have a damn killer. None of the suspects I’ve set up feel right. I’m wondering if I have to write in a whole new character, which would definitely take care of those 3500 words easy.

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I feel kind of gypped. I haven’t had any of the flow experiences other NaNo’ers report. I haven’t dreamed about my story or my characters. (I did have an amazingly cool dream one night, but using standard dream interpretation techniques it’s clear the dream was about me, not about my book.) I haven’t had any days where the story just took off by itself and I could write and write and write and the well would stay primed.

And certainly no 10,000 word days. I know the most I’ve done in a day is 3500. The first time I did 3500 I came home and told Darin, I need to sleep now. After that it was like, Hey, not a bad writing day. No big deal.

2000 is a much easier number to contemplate on a daily basis, though.

§

I have realized I need writing music. I had very few albums on iTunes. Our CDs never really got unpacked after the move—no central stereo system any more, the way we’d had it set up in our living room in LA. The CDs all got stashed in the dining room closet, which does have the wiring to set up a household-wide stereo system, just not the stereo. So as I’ve been sitting here at the dining room table, typing away, I’ve been taking stacks of CDs out of the closet and ripping them. Not all of them (we have a couple of hundred). Just a range of music and moods that might help me when writing. I don’t always want to listen to the conversations at the table next to me when I’m out at a cafe somewhere.

Well, technically, 5,420 to go, plus a little slop to make sure I get verified by the NaNo verifier.

So why am I playing Spaceward Ho! instead of writing? There are only 2 days and 4 hours left! And tomorrow I am with the kids all day, so i shouldn’t be expecting to get too much done during the day.

Part of the problem is I’m not quite adjusted to the Pacific Time Zone yet. We flew to Cincinnati for Thanksgiving, and I basically did two things: hung out quietly in the midst of chaos (let me tell you, when Darin’s extended family—and it extends a little more every year—gets together, there’s chaos to spare) and wrote. Twice I asked someone to take me to the local Borders for a few hours so I could write. I didn’t even look at any books. I just wrote.

I haven’t gone back to read what I’ve written (or, more exactly, I’ve read just pieces here and there, looking for new places to stick stuff in). I am sure of two things: the overwhelming majority of the 44,580 words I’ve produced so far are crap, and I’ve had a ton of fun producing them. One of the best features of NaNoWriMo is that you can’t stop to think or analyze or (worst of all) critique—there’s no damn time. Just vomit now. Think about it later.

I need 5,420 words (plus a few). Surely I can do an easy amount, like 1000 or 1500 tonight, yes?