20340 - Into the forbidden zone.
So I broke 20,000 today. I'm well on my way to eating up the last of my word deficit, and am prepared to sail onward to mid-month, feeling footloose and fancy-free.
So why the disquiet? I think it's because I'm reaching the outer boundary of my usual ability to write. I wrote a similar post to this last year, and frankly, I'm kind of surprised I'm ( Read more... )
That being said I am the worst person to mention this but shall do it anyway. Should 50,000 words really be the goal? I mean it’s a great starter goal but I think your goal of finishing last years is much more admirable. 50,000 words is 50,000 words but a completed novel is something much more. I understand that and I tend to loath books. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate fragments of literary gold from Dickens to Twain I have been disenchanted with books every since the 7th grade (In the 5th grade I used to put 1000 page adult novels away left and right. Especially Robin Cook, Michael Chriton and Steven King). Somewhere along the way I just lost interest.
As a side note you should get the finished product published and bound into something more real. The inet makes that easy these days.
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And it is - No amount of time could be spent within the constraints of 30 days to compose a piece with the kind of polish required (much less proofreading) in order to have a realsie novel.
The idea is that when you write the first draft of a novel, it's going to suck. Hard. Whether you're Salman Rushdie or Stephen King (or Amateur hour star Scott Slater, for that matter) It's going to be awful... incomprehensible. Dialogue will not sound right, settings will be disjointed and strange, plot will be... non existent. First drafts are ALWAYS ass. Nano strives to break authors of the deluded notion that they're going to write perfect prose right off the bat, that the story will flow like sparkling water from a virgin waterfall... all that crap. And thinking that you have to be perfect the first time is what kills a lot of writers. For most people, writing a novel ends with the fear that what you're writing sucks. And the truth is... It does.
So, if it's going to suck ass, why not get it done as soon as possible? If it's going to be bad, why not get it out of the way? 50,000 is a somewhat arbitrary number (the Great Gatsby weighs in at about 50,000 words... most novels these days are much larger) but doing it over 30 days gives you a sense of reckless abandon that is, in my opinion, absolutely necessary to shake off your inner editor, that hateful voice in your head that picks apart grammar and tells you that you're stuff is never going to be good enough. I love feeling like the deadline is looming... it makes me feel like I'm doing something important. and I am. I'm rescuing my books from being burned. And more than that, I'm going to come away from November with a sense that I accomplished something, even if it's an incomplete first draft of a novel. I still remember that feeling from last year, and even if I regret the lack of follow-up on last year's book, the memory of that feeling that I did something, for once, was very powerful - on a par with the feeling I have when I think about having quit smoking.
I'm really rambly, and maybe even a little accusatory. But I like the premise, and the goal, and the feeling.
Also, Dickens sucks.
Re: bookbinding etc. will be explored once it's complete. My buddy self published, and I want to look into it, but I'm very averse to the idea of vanity publishing.
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Its the state novels belong in
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