The Long and the Short (of writing)
So June 30th is the last day for people who participated in National Novel Writing Month to submit and get free copies of their stories. Happily, I did manage to get it in with an entire day to spare, primarily by virtue of me writing like a madwoman late into Sunday morning. I am not joking when I say that I probably managed to write something like 10,000 words in about twelve hours. Perhaps the end result isn't as polished as I would like, but it suits my purposes.
The whole incident did get me thinking about how much of a polar opposite the two experiences are, though. When you do National Novel Writing Month, you have thirty days to write 50,000 words. More often than not, participants have trouble coming up with that many words, even if they throw in random lists or elaborate descriptions. So the difficulty is in getting in as many words as possible.
If you're an idiot like me and leave finishing up the story until June, however, the problem is that you need to wrap the story up as quickly as possible. You no longer have the luxury of putting in long, rambling conversations or small character exploration moments (Large ones, however, should be included if you want your readers to care about your characters). Now the challenge is to use as few words as possible to get a coherent final product. Fortunately for me, my writing technique is to jump from scene to scene, writing the stuff I'm interested in. Finishing the story becomes a matter of filling in the gaps, which allows for a fair bit of consolidation.
At any rate, though, I did finish it and submit it with no problems. The books themselves should arrive mid-July. And after a break to recharge my writing batteries, I'll be back to writing some Hornblower fanfiction. There's a project I've had planned that's been sitting on the backburner for a long time...
The whole incident did get me thinking about how much of a polar opposite the two experiences are, though. When you do National Novel Writing Month, you have thirty days to write 50,000 words. More often than not, participants have trouble coming up with that many words, even if they throw in random lists or elaborate descriptions. So the difficulty is in getting in as many words as possible.
If you're an idiot like me and leave finishing up the story until June, however, the problem is that you need to wrap the story up as quickly as possible. You no longer have the luxury of putting in long, rambling conversations or small character exploration moments (Large ones, however, should be included if you want your readers to care about your characters). Now the challenge is to use as few words as possible to get a coherent final product. Fortunately for me, my writing technique is to jump from scene to scene, writing the stuff I'm interested in. Finishing the story becomes a matter of filling in the gaps, which allows for a fair bit of consolidation.
At any rate, though, I did finish it and submit it with no problems. The books themselves should arrive mid-July. And after a break to recharge my writing batteries, I'll be back to writing some Hornblower fanfiction. There's a project I've had planned that's been sitting on the backburner for a long time...