November 29, 2005
50,077
50,077 was the total wordcount when I uploaded tonight, which makes me a winner (and somehow, contradictorily, this has put the line "I'm a loser, baby" in my head... sooooy un perdedor... gettin' funky with the cheese wiz...).
So, it's still only a milestone, because I'm nowhere near done with the draft, but I know these characters so much better than I did when I started this project four weeks ago today. So I'm kind of glad I'm not done yet, because it means I get to keep hanging out with them.
Mick's in the middle of making a call to Kurt from a payphone on the pier in Boothbay Harbor. She's in a yellow rain slicker and it's drizzling. I gotta go find out what happens next.
Posted by sarah at 11:27 PM | Comments (2)
November 16, 2005
Still going
Thanks to those of you who stopped by to cheer me on. I just wanted to offer a noveling update. So, I’ve written 30,000 words in 16 days. That’s more than my entire senior thesis in college, and consequently more than I’ve ever written on one topic (unless maybe you want to count “unrequited crushes” as a topic and add up the word count of all my high school journals… heh). When you put 30,000 words in 12-point Courier, double spaced, which is apparently what publishers ask for, I have over 120 pages of novel. Not that I’m anywhere remotely close to wanting to publish this thing, mind you.
But it’s been an incredibly interesting, challenging, fun, and educational experience thus far. If you’re reading this and you’ve ever had a vague thought that writing a novel is something you might like to do “some day,” I can’t recommend the NaNoWriMo process highly enough. It’s amazing how, with a commitment of a couple hours a day, every day, you can transform yourself into a novelist. The commitment to a crazy, silly endeavor is so freeing. I have days when it’s easy, when the next scene is pulsing in my fingertips just waiting to pour out onto the page. And I have days when I drag myself to my desk and look at the little clock on my laptop and sigh and say, “Okay, I will write for 15 minutes,” and I do and it feels like what I’m typing is the most pointless exchange of dialogue or the most banal description ever to be put into words, and then I end up typing for another 15 minutes and it stops sucking quite so bad, and then another and I add up my word count and I’m up another 1,000 and I shut my laptop and go downstairs to reward myself with some Degrassi Junior High.
Some days the world feels more complex and beautiful than a lifetime of novel-writing could ever capture, and I feel like I’m dashing along, gathering scenes and images and typing them up as quickly as I can. Other days, I just feel tired, and I want to stay in bed all day and forget I made this commitment. But I know I won’t, and that’s been the most valuable thing I have learned. That I can stick with this, through the good days and the bad –- already I feel like I’ve weathered several deserts of dried-up inspiration and come out into the even more fertile pastures on the other side. I think that giving up has always been my biggest fear –- not just with this project, but with writing in general. I saw such potential in it that it felt safer to hold off on really starting than to start and give up. I’m into week three of my novel-writing month, and I see no signs of giving up, but I’ll check back in and give a celebratory holler when I pass 50,000 words.
Oh, and p.s. - if you care to check up on me yourself, you can do so via my profile at the NaNoWriMo web site, which is here.
Posted by sarah at 04:19 PM | Comments (2)
November 03, 2005
Noveling
As you can see from the little pencil-toting runner icon over there on the right, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short) this November. It's the third day, and I passed 5,000 words this morning, so I'm on pace, given that the official goal is 50,000 words in 30 days. I'm a tenth of the way there. And I'm having a blast.
I've been setting the coffee maker to turn on at 6:00 a.m. and getting up and writing for an hour or more in the mornings. I've loved walking to work the past three days knowing that I've already been so productive.
It's not that what I'm writing is necessarily all that good, although I think a decent percentage of it at least has potential. It's mostly that the sheer act of writing, of sitting at my desk and typing 2,000 words a day, is reminding me how much I used to love this. Writing has become so fraught over the years, something I obsess about more often than I actually do; and so just doing it has been a powerful relief from all the angst and mental energy that has gone into fretting about not doing it.
2,000 words a day is a lot and yet not a lot at the same time. I've written far more in a day, back in college when I'd pull all-nighters to get a paper done, and even some short stories have come faster, in great bursts of marathon writing. 2,000 words a day has been taking me between two and three hours. It's enough to feel like a commitment, but not so much that I can't still have a life. Mostly? I've just given up non-essential TV. (Essential TV being Arrested Development, Gilmore Girls, My Name is Earl, and Nip/Tuck.)
I realize I've been terrible and completely inconsistent about updating this web site. At least now I have a really good excuse, for the rest of the month.
Posted by sarah at 12:54 PM | Comments (3)
