Challenge: NaNoWriMo 2024
Progress: 94% (47,191 out of 50,000 words)
This accounts for the good, revised words, which are about 30,000 or so and then the 17,000 that are a messy mess and I may not even keep them. Messy words are not in the draft file. They are in a file of their own. Unless I make order out of them, they are nothing but rambling thoughts and unknown possibilities. We should all have the latter though it's what they can do in the end that is worthy of counting. I did not count them in my personal total. I have already commented on how many words I can, with thought and intent, write a month. Around 15,000 to 18,000. That's it. I do believe counting words is valuable.
“Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”
The Rambling minds....here I go.
However, that said, no, I would never be able to sustain such an amount consistently. I would say 20,000 words is closer. Remember, I am editing and revising as I go, not first drafting. 20 pages a week is monumental for me as a writer. And writing 80 pages a month means 20 pages a week, revising, editing, and note taking as I go. Some weeks I might do that and more. But consistently. No way. Not even for 80 pages. Some weeks I am sure to do less. There was a time when I could write almost 100 very good pages a month, but that time is long past and accepting that is critical to be being a successful writer at this time in my life. Even 18,000 words a month seems daunting to me. I am going to work for less, and settle on 15,000 words a month which is 60 pages a month. That is all I need. 60 pages is 3 very good pages for 5 day working week and I can write a damn good book a year which will please an editor. That is the goal. This was the goal of NaNo this time, to see what I could do intellectually and physically. I had to challenge myself and do this with intent, because people need to have faith in my abilities. Do you know what 3 damn good pages a week means. That 60 pages a month times 12 months. That is every weekend off and probably more. That's 720 pages. Damn. And I don't write 720 page books. I am writing, at most, a 550 page manuscript this time around. What I know is this time next year my manuscript will be in New York City, possibly sitting on some editor's desk. Possibilities are real.
Some serious concerns I made a note of doing NaNo.
Other things I learned and I did this scientifically. There are benefits to tracking your word count or page count. I highly recommend tracking your process, not only writing but your self care and other aspects related. That time counts. Habits are your life. Good habits are worthy of that little gold star on a page and lots of gold stars should be rewarded with something special. This is how human behavior works. Of course, rewards won't work if a person just does anything and everything they want all the time without care and self-reflection. So this is where discipline matters. Self regulation matters. A good reward system is contingent on making rules and sticking to rules. Basically I am not an extrinsic reward seeker. Most highly creative people are not. But a highly gifted person can learn to create an environment where work is important, work is tracked, self-care is tracked, and rewards are given for keeping to both. Finishing one thing is extremely important in this environment. Finishing the goal. And that leads to my final statement.
Make a work statement. The dream work statement with all this in mind. Write with INTENT. Intent is my new special word. I use it a lot in my writing, too. Because intent means something. Unlike goals, New Years Resolutions, and so forth, our intentions are shaped by our experiences, our deepest desires and loves. Intentions give us meaning. They provide focus. Every day I will begin with intention and if I am challenged emotionally or physically, I have a tool box of skills to help me through. Why? Because experience is a brutal teacher if one learns from mistakes. I have learned, some days, the hardest way. So I have skills from experience and time. I no longer do things over and over the same way because it's the way I go. I change.
These are good skills to have in writing. To create a story with intent, to reflect on what you are writing and why, what you want the story to mean, it's promise and premise, its emotional journey. How it will feel to the reader, too. I now believe intention is very necessary and that is why a lot of creatives fail. They are always looking at the end result when the process is what counts. Process is everything. The right attention and amount of attention a writer gives to process is critical, to what works and doesn't, to how experimenting and failing counts too. That showing up is everything. That the power of those first 30 minutes when you sit down with intent are everything.
I so love writing...and the process. I always choose to learn new things while I write a new book. I set goals for new things. For example, I am pushing myself out of a comfort zone on both Point of View and verb tense. I am learning how to write good vignettes. This was intent. Also, I am learning how to do all this on my own, because predicament has placed me alone in this journey. This has been difficult. But I learned. My social life is now directed to people who don't write or want to talk about writing. It may do. Smiling.
In the third memo of Calvino’s five, he describes the quality of exactitude. He explains it in having three main points: 1. A well-defined, well calculated plan for the work, 2. An evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images, 3. A language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination. In the literal and most obvious aspect, exactitude is being as exact and concise as possible. When we write, we able to erase, delete, and rewrite in order to make a more perfect work.A work of literature can be created so that we are able to visualize the smallest details by means of using language effectively. Calvino argues that vagueness in words leads to “a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic”. He goes on to say, that even writing that appears to be vague is, in itself, a form of exactitude. He argues this point by using the vague and indefinite poems of Giacomo Leopardi. Although vague, exactitude is achieved by an enormous amount of attention that went into achieving the vagueness.
To sum up, exactitude can head in two directions:
- in the reduction of secondary events to abstract patterns according to which one can carry out operations and domestic theorems,
- the effort made by words to present the tangible aspect of things as tangible as possible.
This is from Setting Sail.
https://marianeris.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/calvinos-exactitude/
So this is probably it for me on drafting for NaNo. I have reached 15,248 words which is 60 pages of good text. However, it is time to pause and revise. This morning I printed it off and made notes on things I need to change and things I need to revise badly. Not editing. Please people, I am not talking editing. I feel very good about this. 60 good pages in 10 days is awesome for me. It means I can do 120 good pages a month and that's been my initial goal for writing from now on. One can write a book a year at that pace. And I needed to find a pace where I did not have neck aches, headaches, or strained eyes. Usually I overdo work and find myself physically ill or working at a pace I cannot maintain. And the entire point is to create a doable habit. I am continuing and will be posting my little NaNo things, but they will be called Drafting Notebook 2024-25. One of the issues I had this year with using the NaNo Tracker is it no longer has the graph that I used last year, where I can just pull it up and see days and word counts for each day. That was important for me and why I wanted to track on NaNo. Now I have to keep my own. And if I do that, why use NaNo. As far as I can tell that's gone. If anybody can find it, let me know. Laughing. Also if someone reads this and knows of another word tracker that does daily tracks and keeps that track available, let me know.
The beginning of the book, this new section I had to write, before I got to Part 11 is about 120 pages so I am half done as far as drafting. However, that is not exactly what I want for myself at this point. I want a revised, very good draft of Part I with the new structure, and all the little extras. I have some diary entries, some small sections that are vignettes, and these have not been incorporated. I want to do that. I want it to look as close to the vision of a printed book. That's how I work. I divide the book into parts and draft and revise those parts as I go. This is my compromise with my old system of revising every single day as I go. Old habits are hard to break. Part of me will always be revising something as I go but I do relax a bit and just draft. But not crappy drafts. I simply don't have the personality to do that and I fail time and time again. When you do the same thing over and over and it's mistake. Stop. Laughing. I finally stopped. Psychologically that kind of draft ends up being such a mess for me that I just put it aside. I did keep last year's draft because it was not that bad. But damn, I created a new subplot, changed the MMC, changed other characters, moved the setting to historical from contemporary and even how the novel is structured. So there. Now you see why I have to revise as I go. Otherwise I am writing a new book. Laughing. I am not the only writer to do this. Susan Dennard, Laini Taylor, Alexandra Bracken, and well William Faulkner work this way, all from notes or a plot, constantly revising in the process. There is no right or wrong. There is only a method that will get an author to the finish line. I am desperate for that finishing line.
I am going to pause too right now and read three books. My Sweet Folly by Laura Kinsale, The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones, and finish up The Once and Future Witches by Alix Harrow. I am making notes with these books. Learning.
The biggest change in fiction since I had career in it is style and emotional impact. Otherwise known as voice. Laughing. This is the big thing and what will get you read or bought — or rejected. I have spent a lot of time practicing writing to improve my skills and give my voice it's power.
Words to date: 15,248
Music: Summertime Madness and Wildfire by SYML and a 2 minute instrumental by London Grammar. I had popcorn chicken and a baked sweet potato. Treat: a small Coke. Lots of water. Feelings: Good but I am very tired. This last week was a bit overwhelming.
Note, Day 1 – This year's Nano is rewriting and revising a broken draft from last year. Much of it must be rewriting as many chapters were lost. I changed MMC, too which was a shock. Piecing together what I could keep is more difficult than rewriting I think because it is never in its origin form and is altered to fit the new draft. But I worked on all that "puzzling" and "plotting" and "planning" before NaNoWriMo began, creating an outline with copious notes on how to proceed. Challenging but not impossible. Other significant changes. It was a contemporary now it is a historical which means 90% of what I wrote is rewritten for that change alone. Summary: Never do NaNo and a crappy draft without a plot and lots of other work on story. It will change. Current image: Dragon. This book is a dragon I must slay. Words: 3289. Very good words. Planned. Rehearsed in head for days. I wanted this beginning. Song, Birds by Imagine Dragon and King and Lionheart by Of Monsters and Men. Food: Baked Potato and Grill Salmon. Lots of water and some tea. Never got out of my pajamas. Where: At home at my writing desk on my Apple Desktop. I feel good about it but have a headache.
