This is kind of how I feel when I started my first Nanowrimo last year. Fifty thousand words to write in a month, crikey. However much you break it down into the sixteen hundred or so words a day it still seemed like an insurmountable task. With little more than a silly title to go on I had little idea of how I was going to proceed into the story. I took the easy way out. I wrote as a timeline diary of events. Each day of November became a day in my story, each daily entry preceded with a location and time. It wasn’t a great plot device, but it helped me through the month. I also fell into the trap of trying to hit the daily target. There’s no problem with this, and indeed is a great motivational tool for the first timer. This year I am going to try and ignore the daily target. There is a school of thought that your average Wrimo novel chapter is around sixteen hundred words long for a reason, and this could stifle the authors creativity. So this time I am going to try and fly without the safety net, and see how I get on! The other lesson I learnt is to not tell people too much about what is going on in the story. I got inundated with ideas for my story last year. It got kind of tricky to let people down lightly; not including their ideas. This was my silly story, and I wanted all the ideas to come from my twisted mind, not anyone else's.
As the month went on, sometimes the top of the climb didn’t seem to far away, other times it seemed to stretch further into the distance. At these times you just have to reach for the next branch and grab hold. Sure enough you will get to the top. At the end there are a mixed bag of emotions. Relief that it’s all over, emptiness that there is no more writing to do, curiosity over how others have done. You have a manuscript of sorts. Sure it’s full of typo’s,, sentences that don’t make sense, mangled grammar, but a manuscript all the same. If you are brave enough you can read through it, and cringe at all your mistakes. If you are braver, and thick skinned, you can encourage others to read it, and smile as they pick out all the errors. Then all too soon, it’s time to let go. Leave the story alone for a little while. Get back to real life. Have a rest. Give yourself a little distance between this mad, crazy word dash, and your normal existence. Then you will feel serene for a while!
That is until you decide to do a rewrite of course….
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