It’s hard to believe that I’m just over a week into NaNoWriMo! I had been feeling like I wasn’t meeting my goals and was disappointed in myself for days that I didn’t write. As I got ready to write this post, I realized that it has been a very productive week and I wasn’t acknowledging the learning and decisions I made this week that will help me as November progresses. As I write this post, I have 20,952 words in my novel (admittedly, not all written this month, but I won’t call it cheating, more on this later) but aside from word count, the other things I accomplished this week put me in a much better place to be getting more words out as the month progresses.
I’ve learned a lot this week about myself and my writing habits. I started to understand why I was struggling to write and kept procrastinating. Not only was I feeling a bit lost because I didn’t have a clear idea of the story and plot (if you remember my post when I first started, I had hoped to have a better outline and plan on November 1st but life had gotten in the way), I really didn’t know what genre I was writing and in order to be able to sit down and write, I had to answer the question: What kind of book am I writing?
Since I first got the idea to write a book, I wasn’t sure if it would be a memoir, creative non-fiction or fiction. I am writing about a personal experience and it is just a portion of my life so it could have been done as a memoir but I’ve always wanted to write a story rather than a reflective piece or essay.
That lead me t0 creative non-fiction, where you are telling about your life but it’s written as a story. I thought a lot about this but wasn’t sure I was ready to share with the world that this was, in fact, my story. I thought I had landed on fiction, where I could write from my experience but had full reign to make things more interesting and follow a contrived plot rather than the real thing.
As I sat down to write, I realized four things that changed my mind:
- I felt really compelled to tell parts of my story that were really key for me but didn’t make the best plot line. There were details I wanted to tell and to do so would bog down a book covering a full year and may not be the most entertaining within a fictional story.
- As I did my research, I began to form a picture of wanting to really leave people with a message about mental health experience that may not be as clear if it was thought to be fictional. I have some strong feelings about what I went through I felt that I needed more of a platform to share those opinions.
- In light of all of these things I felt I needed to say and explain about my experience, the timeframe I selected – one year – was just too long for one book and I needed to shrink the period of time I was writing about.
- I had been struggling to find the ending, but because my personal story doesn’t really have a satisfying ending like what would be expected in fiction. Once I decided to shrink the time period, I was able to find a better ending that would be more suitable for readers and was still my truth.
Knowing these things, I knew that it would need to be creative non-fiction and would just cover about a one month period of my life. Although I was still a little anxious about calling it non-fiction, I know that once it’s done I have choices – share/publish or not and I can always work to fictionalize it or use a pen name if needed.
That sent me into research and planning mode. Once I made the genre decision, I needed to ensure I got my facts straight. I had already started to gather records from that period but it was time to really go through them and build out the timeline. I also needed to identify other sources of information about that time period. I got quite a solid start to this completed this week.
With my timeline in place, I set about building a rough outline. I had previously been trying to outline the fictional story based on the Save the Cat framework. I still really liked the framework but with my decision to shrink the time period really helped me understand why I had been struggling with the previous full year outline. I built a chapter and word count guideline for my new story and I can’t tell you how much having this simple one page sketch eased my mind.
With this new [very] rough outline, I have been able to visualize the story, find a suitable ending (not happy but hopeful), and give myself more direction for my writing. This allowed me to go back through pieces I have written before and put those concepts into the manuscript where they now fit. There was likely 10,000 or so words I had written before the month started that got added.
With my outline in hand, I have now been able to sit down to participate in writing sprints and just pull up a chapter and start writing it. The key to getting out lots of words in a sprint is to not be worried about the full plot details or the quality of the writing, you just focus on getting words on a page. I am participating in at least one writing sprint per day through the BC Federation of Writers, Dabble’s NaNoWriMo activities and Shut Up & Write!
The sprints are really helping me get words on a page and right now, this is key for me because I can’t edit the words in my head. After adding in the pieces I’d written before, I printed out what I have so far and in my non-writing moments, I’ll be pulling out the parts of the writing that will stay, some will stay where they are and some will moved elsewhere. I’m also sure I’ll find duplicates because the pieces I’ve pulled in were written individually as exercises or moments of inspiration, not really in the order of a book. Once I get through that, I’ll likely lose at least half of these words AND will have to rewrite much of it.
And this is why I don’t think I’m “cheating” when I say I’m at 20,000 words and why my wordcount may sit at one level for a while or even drop during the month. I haven’t completely decided on whether I will do much editing to those sections yet but have also made my personal NaNoWriMo goal to be 80,000 words (the expected word count for a book in this genre) as I am hoping to have the whole first draft complete so I can start tearing it apart in December with the editing process.
And if you’re still thinking I’ve cheated, let’s also remember that I wrote and posted a 1,200 word short story, two blog posts and have done some research for December’s Deadlines for Writers story which needs to be posted on December 4th.
And if that doesn’t convince you that my progress is legit, I don’t really care because I’m doing this for me, not for anyone else.
See you next week!
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