Word count: 23,169. Almost halfway there!
When you first start the NaNoWriMo journey, the first few days are filled with excitement and newness. You’re creating characters and setting, introducing plots, and writing out those first few critical scenes that you’ve been thinking about in your head for the past week. But as time wears on and you leave those eye-grabbing opening scenes and start delving deeper into the story, what seems like a killer plot filled with memorable characters becomes plodding, slow, and muddlesome, and before you know it you don’t want to write anymore about these boring people.
What you do with this moment is what separates the real writers from the hacks. The real writers persevere. They slog through the slow bits word by word if they have to, dragging their story kicking and screaming through every hackneyed phrase, every bland cardboard cutout of a character. The real writers understand that this first critical draft is about building a skeleton on which your finished novel will sit. The important thing (and this is the crux of the NaNoWriMo philosophy) is that you keep moving forward, keep writing one word after the other until you get out of the slump. Never mind how it reads now, never mind how good or bad it is, eventually you will get to a scene you want to write and the whole thing will speed up all over again.
What got me through this slump both this year and last year was the core idea I was writing about. Novels aren’t like short stories, they can’t rely on the kinds of single plot points and thought experiments that short stories excel at. A novel has to be a slow burn, a long form story with a long form idea that needs all that time and support to grow and bloom. The idea needs to be broad enough to support its length and breadth, but not so broad that you don’t know where in the hell you want to go after you write the single scene that’s been in your head for the last year. It was enough for me to say “just keep writing it, one word after the other, you need this to get from A to B.” And sure enough, once I hit B, the words spilled out faster and faster, and I was back on track.
I’m about to hit the halfway point. According to past experience, I still have one or two slumpy bits left in the process (I can already feel the next one coming), but by the time I hit 40k the words will spill out of me like they desperately need to be put down. The threads of my plot will find places to weave themselves together, the characters will do things I don’t expect that make me squeal with delight, and the broad idea’s premise which I have waited so long to state will finally bloom.
…I hope so, anyway. Still have to write everything in between first.
(Pictured above: my workstation, which is tricked out for my day job, sound editing, but makes for fine writing. This picture is pretty old–I’ve since updated to one of the Apple chiclet keyboards and moved the desk into a different room, but it gives you an idea of my conditions).
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