I’ve managed to catch up on my NaNoWriMo word count, I was one day behind and I was finding it virtually impossible to find the inspiration to catch up whilst I was in the middle of my story. Now the unplanned Part II is finished and I’ve just started the final part, it feels like I’m on the downward slope and I can finish this (although I think the final product will be about 60,000 words). It must be tough for those NaNoWriMoers writing what will be in the end 100,000 word stories because I think writing the middle of any story is probably the toughest part and obviously 50,000 is for an 100,000 story half way through. Thinking about it my main project, which stalled long before NaNoWriMo has stalled again right in the middle of the story.
NaNoWriMo has certainly provoked lots of thought from me and not just on my plot line. I’m doing as well Susan Hill’s Creative Writing course (see my blog roll to the right to find the link to Susan’s blog which will take you to her course) and we’ve been talking about drafts (although I seem to find the word ‘rewrite’ more naturally comfortable to me). Susan maintains you shouldn’t need to do more than 1 or 2 drafts / rewrites, now my NaNoWriMo project if I were ever to show it to a publisher or agent it would require so much rewriting, it would probably be almost unrecognisable. Now I know there’s the phrase along the lines of ‘Editing is for December’ but for my NaNoWriMo it would take alot longer than that. I’ve been reading on Susan’s recommendations the Paris Review Interviews to and Hemingway’s interview gave lots of food for thought, basically he worked in the mornings and his managed max around 500 words (I’m paraphrasing here so might not have totally accurate figures) and if he managed 500 words it meant he could spend more time fishing or something and I bet as a result (I don’t know) he did not do many drafts! Whereas the more your write the more likely that what you’re writing is going to be complete and utter &^%$.
