Some of you may or have noticed that I haven’t been posting quite as much this month as I typically do, and mostly that’s because I’m currently halfway through pounding out an entire novel within a month. Inspired by those crazy kids at NaNoWriMo, I decided to give it a try myself in February. I’m happy to say that I’m currently on schedule, cruising through about 1,700 words a day, having racked up over 27,000 words as of today. Here’s are some of my thoughts about the experience so far as I pass the halfway mark:
-Writing on a daily basis with a word count goal as opposed to a schedule works really well for me. I’ve heard from several writers that it helps to schedule 20-40 minute daily blocks of time where they do nothing but write, which is a great idea, but for some reason it never really meshed for me. I don’t have a regular enough schedule to have a single block of time that is always free, and typically I write throughout the whole day anyway. However, having a goal that forces me to hit a certain amount of words is perfect for me, as it forces me to write even when I have no desire to. Somehow, pretty much every day I’ve managed to get my 1,700 words in.
-I really have no idea if the novel I’m writing is going to be any good. This is pretty similar to the experience of writing a feature play, so I’m pretty used to it, but it’s been a real challenge not to let self doubt get in my way.
-I’m already thinking about doing another personal NaNoWriMo, as I love being this productive. I’m wondering how I can translate this kind of exercise to script writing. Maybe 1-2 scenes per day in a script that’s broken down into 35-40 scenes?
-I write way, way too many sentences that are ‘X did this. X did that. X did this and that.’ Let’s get some compound sentences up in here!
-There have been at least three instances of me trying to use a word that doesn’t actually exist, then wondering what the hell I’ve been saying the past 25 years.
-Chipolte might as well be a sponsor of my book since I’ve probably written half of it at one of their many locations.
That’s it for now! Two weeks left until I’m all finished up and I go back to my normal writing projects that I was working on before this grand little experiment.