NaNoWriMor Report: Day 2
I realize it's only the second day and this may very well change before the month is over, but I believe I have learned something important about myself already: I need very specific goals when writing. Like, word count goals.
Before I even had the basic seed of a plot, I knew I wanted to do this whole thing in roughly a three-act structure with a teaser and a tag-much like an episode of a TV show.
I can be obsessively anal retentive about things so I decided to set word goals for each of the above sections, breaking it down into 5500 words for the teaser and tag and 13,000 for each act to reach the total goal of 50,000.
The longest (continuous plot line) story I've ever published is Keeper, clocking in at 37,000+ words, but it is definitely the exception and not the rule. My average is probably closer to 6,000 words.
Which means each act of my story is roughly twice my usual story length, the tags and teasers just barely under it.
When I first sat down to write yesterday, it suddenly hit me: 5500 words for a teaser is a LOT of words for just setting up the whole shebang.
I had my plot at this point and it consisted of three things-each of which I expected to get about 500-1000 words out of each. That would still put me way under my goal of 5500.
But then I started writing, and I kept those numbers in mind. Halfway through I was still sure I wasn't going to make it and then I thought of another two scenes I could put in to stretch that introduction out a little.
And now?
I just finished my teaser. It's got 6575 words in it.
I'm excited to have so much of my story done already, but more than that I'm excited about how the whole thing happened. Knowing I had a goal to reach, knowing that my usual race to the end of the scene/section/story wasn't going to meet that goal forced me to really expand my ideas, to draw them out and to add more detail.
Like I said, I don't know if this is just the excitement of the first week and if it will last, but I'm feeling really good about this whole thing now that I have proof I can indeed meet some high expectations I've set for myself.
Before I even had the basic seed of a plot, I knew I wanted to do this whole thing in roughly a three-act structure with a teaser and a tag-much like an episode of a TV show.
I can be obsessively anal retentive about things so I decided to set word goals for each of the above sections, breaking it down into 5500 words for the teaser and tag and 13,000 for each act to reach the total goal of 50,000.
The longest (continuous plot line) story I've ever published is Keeper, clocking in at 37,000+ words, but it is definitely the exception and not the rule. My average is probably closer to 6,000 words.
Which means each act of my story is roughly twice my usual story length, the tags and teasers just barely under it.
When I first sat down to write yesterday, it suddenly hit me: 5500 words for a teaser is a LOT of words for just setting up the whole shebang.
I had my plot at this point and it consisted of three things-each of which I expected to get about 500-1000 words out of each. That would still put me way under my goal of 5500.
But then I started writing, and I kept those numbers in mind. Halfway through I was still sure I wasn't going to make it and then I thought of another two scenes I could put in to stretch that introduction out a little.
And now?
I just finished my teaser. It's got 6575 words in it.
I'm excited to have so much of my story done already, but more than that I'm excited about how the whole thing happened. Knowing I had a goal to reach, knowing that my usual race to the end of the scene/section/story wasn't going to meet that goal forced me to really expand my ideas, to draw them out and to add more detail.
Like I said, I don't know if this is just the excitement of the first week and if it will last, but I'm feeling really good about this whole thing now that I have proof I can indeed meet some high expectations I've set for myself.