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on the care and feeding of novels
Dec. 5th, 2006 02:08 pmFor the month of November, I leapt into NaNoWriMo as a means of propelling myself through (or most of the way through) a first draft of a new novel. Oddly enough, though I'm not a big fan of deadlines and timetables in general (I've been known to say, "I'm not late! I'm Differently Punctual!"), in the case of writing I find it really does help me focus to have a deadline or a challenge in front of me.
I hit November 30th with a total manuscript wordcount of about 88k, 51k of which was the November tally. I didn't hit the end of the novel -- indeed, as I was working on it, I thought it was a hopeless piece of sh*t that should be trashed in the very first moments of December -- but I got pretty close. And I set it aside, letting my brain mull over what I had done.
There's some good stuff in there.
There's some stuff in there that's not particularly good, but is the seeds of something good.
There's some really, really broken crap in there.
But I think, maybe, just maybe, it can be fixed. My characters never really coalesced into 3-D beings for me (except for a pirate, who didn't get nearly enough to do), and the plot arc was too episodic, too disjointed in building to the big conflict. So since I took my fingers off the keyboard and walked away, I've been letting those things roll around in the back of my brain to see if I can make them more shiny and functional. It's going to take a while, I think, but I don't feel nearly as hopeless about this novel as I did five days ago.
I guess that's a good thing.
So, what do you writerly folk do when you need to beef up one particular part of your story -- characters, arc, etc. -- and your brain hasn't quite figured out how yet? Do you do exercises? Leave it alone completely until it starts talking to you again? Some combination? Share your secrets, people! (-:
I hit November 30th with a total manuscript wordcount of about 88k, 51k of which was the November tally. I didn't hit the end of the novel -- indeed, as I was working on it, I thought it was a hopeless piece of sh*t that should be trashed in the very first moments of December -- but I got pretty close. And I set it aside, letting my brain mull over what I had done.
There's some good stuff in there.
There's some stuff in there that's not particularly good, but is the seeds of something good.
There's some really, really broken crap in there.
But I think, maybe, just maybe, it can be fixed. My characters never really coalesced into 3-D beings for me (except for a pirate, who didn't get nearly enough to do), and the plot arc was too episodic, too disjointed in building to the big conflict. So since I took my fingers off the keyboard and walked away, I've been letting those things roll around in the back of my brain to see if I can make them more shiny and functional. It's going to take a while, I think, but I don't feel nearly as hopeless about this novel as I did five days ago.
I guess that's a good thing.
So, what do you writerly folk do when you need to beef up one particular part of your story -- characters, arc, etc. -- and your brain hasn't quite figured out how yet? Do you do exercises? Leave it alone completely until it starts talking to you again? Some combination? Share your secrets, people! (-:
