Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

My Writing To Do List for 2012

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I decided to make a list of the writing projects I have on deck for this year.

  • Finish my rewrite of my first ever novel.
  • Write the second novel in that series.
  • Finish the Macbeth novel. Especially before Rob kills me. Because frankly that would suck.
  • Finish the superhero novel.
  • Finish that one project I’m working on under a pseudonym that already has many fans! Which is totally cool.
  • Send out one play to at least five contests.
  • Do this with at least three plays.
  • Write several more 10-minute plays.
  • Write a one-act play.
  • Write a full-length play.
  • Send these out.
  • Work on a list of possible ideas for a screenplay.

You know, for someone who complains she doesn’t have enough ideas, I certainly do have plenty of projects to work on.

And seeing it laid out like that reinforces my desire to have serious writing time!

What I learned from this year’s Nano

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Woot, I won:

NaNoWriMo Winner 2010

Scarily enough, I realized the first time I did NaNoWriMo was in 2004. (Yes! I was ahead of the curve! I’m TRENDY!) And one big difference between this year and that one, I realized, was not that I finished on the last day (you tell me to do 50,000 words in 30 days, apparently I get it into my head that finishing on day 30 is A-OK). No, the big difference is that I much more of a novelist now.

In 2004, on the last day, I was trying desperately to finish the novel. It was a murder mystery, and I had no damn idea whodunnit, so that last day was spent furiously trying to come up with a villain and write out the conclusion, etc, etc. I rewrote that book completely (it’s the book that got me an agent and went out to publishing houses), and while broad story strokes survived from that first draft, not much of the actual writing did. However, on Nov. 30, 2004, I had a complete book. It was fifty thousand words, and I was exhausted. I couldn’t believe I’d written so much on one story before (let alone in thirty days).

On Nov. 30, 2010, after fifty thousand words, I was within seven thousand to ten thousand words of getting to the end of Act I. I wasn’t quite there yet, but I knew the path I was going to take to get there.

That’s quite a difference in writing style.

Admittedly, at least fifteen thousand of the words of this year’s book were spent on scenes that could be politely described as “figuring out my character.” One day I started at the beginning and read all the way through. I ended up completely depressed (because it was clear so much of it was simply figuring my story and my characters out and would have to be thrown out wholesale)…which is why you’re not supposed to read your draft in progress. If I decide to rewrite this story, I know the setup much better now and I would probably try to get to the end of Act I by 40,000 words instead of the 60,000 word point.

I was surprised that the idea of taking 40,000 words just to set everything in motion feels much more comfortable now.