This month is going quite smoothly, but I tend to be a chronic underachiever! Although not far from the stable graph line sloping upward to 50,000 words, I have only surpassed it twice, November 4 and 5th. It would be easier to finish on time in one week if I had, and my failure daily to reach the target is sobering. On average, I am writing 1460 words a day, which is why my current word count needed is 2137. A small deficit kept from November 7th grew significantly with weekend shifts with 0 imput (losing me a 21 day in a row and every day writing. The holy grail of achieving your daily goal for 30 days isn't even on my radar!)
In addition, this year, several in the Montreal group (of which I am grateful for their motivation) are already at 50,000 words and writing beyond! It's exciting to see how some took off running and left a bunch of us the dusk, most of them with day jobs and some of them with lives!
That being said, I finished my last (night) shift yesterday, and feel somewhat lucid today, so I have a really good chance to get this done. My only glitch is a 2 day trip to the scene of my story with a friend, in part to celebrate our current age before upcoming birthdays. I hope she knows how much time writing takes! If not, I am going to be losing sleep for the last push!
What is exciting to me this year is to see how preparation helps. In an ideal plan, your house is in order and your freezer full of food, as well as 30 plot points or scenes for a place to start every day. Still, I have 6 characters, one that is likely to end up on the cutting room floor, that I have enjoyed following around. I never got into those video games like SIM city where you create and world, but I feel like it's very similar. In my hands, my characters resemble awkward monsters like Frankenstein's, and like the early CG effects associated with creating people and putting them in situations.
The other factor was a very frustrated creative writing teacher that initially I found very critical. With time, I saw that what he was criticizing was a group of writers that were excellent at writing what they knew (their own reflections), but the class was meant to create something new. That is not easy, and it was not easy for our teacher to get us to live out our fantasies. I am starting to get it, finally. After decades of journaling, my ability to report and reflect is not bad (not good, but not terrible!), but I have to create something new.
The question of, "What if" is a great starting point. What if my character living an ordinary life of a daily grind has something extraordinary happen? What then? That is when the fun starts!
Next, when your characters are boring you, there are ideas like: Flashback to explain their emotions. Grab a tearjerker. Stir the pot. Forget the rules. Write the rules. Depend on insanity. Some of this I credit to Scarlet, our Montreal leader extraordinaire. Some she would credit to a packet of cards from the Writer Emergency Pack by John August, like Change every blessing into a curse, That's Not the Dragon, and Standard Procedures.
My fellow Montreal writers have also been inspiring. We have virtual sessions where we chat and inspire, and then write for 30 minutes of the hour. There is some competition in how many words we each type, but it is a friendly one. Like yoga, most of us are just competing with ourselves, and at times the days with the lowest word counts are necessary moments in creating the next new idea. There is also a group that hangs out at different times on A Writers Mess on a server called DISCORD, and the sprints are frequent and short, with lots of nice things (if you are willing to learn a little coding) and helpful people to coax you along in your journey. You can even use the BOT to do it all by yourself! I found that helpful last night at 23:43!
As an exercise in not judging what we write, this elusive goal keeps the critic on our shoulder in check. Afterwards, some serious judgement will be necessary. At one point I was so tired, and my character had had three name changes, that I couldn't remember what to call her!
I have learnt that your soundtrack cannot be too slow, and my new favourite is a 25 minute 42 second CBC recording of Alexandra Streliska "Inscape". I also recommend google docs. It has an excellent autocorrect for grammar, keeps a word count total or for a highlighted part. Plus, my daughter has more than once been my IT support to help me get out of trouble!
So today I start at 35,043 words in my count. A few are plot points and not yet stories. I am taking a risk not using these words to contribute to my word count, but I think reflection is a powerful thing and I might not have much bandwidth after this to consolidate my thoughts. Last time (and for the first time in 2019) I wrote 50,000 words, I couldn't look at it for months. It speaks to under training, and reminds me of the marathon I ran once. I was in good shape and definitely did some training, but after I finished, I didn't run for months. Not great!
I am excited to put the two parts of the story together, and I have put out feelers to a few people willing to read at least part of it. This will not be great Canadian novel published for the world to enjoy, but it will be a stepping stone to something else. If nothing else, it is wonderful to see the process if you just keep applying the work!
Good luck to all my NaNoWriMoers out there. Whether you make your goal, or fail to achieve it but do something else instead, you are a winner! Showing up is more than most are able to do, and you did that and more! I am so proud of you!
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