• Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you. ~Ogden Nash #
• “I’ve been thinking Hobbes –”
  “On a weekend?”
  “Well, it wasn’t on purpose…” Calvin & Hobbes #quote # [Read more…]

Whew. How can it be December already?

This was the first year I made a serious effort to write an entire novel during the month of November. It’s an entertaining challenge, and I wanted to see what happened to the quality of my writing if I really pushed past my usual daily word count. I didn’t write every single day, so I didn’t reach the goal of 50,000 words, but my novel is about 2/3 complete, which is definitely a jump start.

I learned a few things over the course of the month:

If I really wanted to finish in 30 days, I probably spent too much time mapping out my novel and creating backstory for my characters. If I added the word count of all the background information I wrote, I probably would easily have 50K, but that’s not exactly the point. It’s National Novel Writing Month, not National Novel and Notes Writing Month.

Once the novel was mapped out, the writing went surprisingly smoothly. I was able to sit down each day, glance over my notes and the last bit from the previous day and start typing.

I discovered that I can write in less than ideal circumstances. I’ve always liked to wait until until everyone was out of the house before I started to focus, but with the pressure of 50K bearing down, I found that I could write even with people sitting in the same room chomping on crunchy stuff. It isn’t as smooth or flowing as writing I’ve done in better circumstances, but it’s good to know that I can do it, because in a household of six, it’s hard to find solitude.

I found that the quality of my rough draft was not significantly worse than those I have written more slowly. If anything, I probably managed to keep more of my facts straight between chapters, because I didn’t have time to forget things I’d already written.

Bottom line? NaNoWriMo was an interesting and useful experience. I now know that I can write a lot faster than I have been writing, and that a quick rough draft is about the same as a slow rough draft. I know that mapping out the storyline ahead of time is a good way for me to work. Even when I deviated from the outline by adding or cutting a scene, I still had the basic structure to rely on. It enabled me to work out problems before I began to write, which made daily writing flow much more smoothly.

For the coming year, I plan to maintain a brisker writing pace, and to finish this draft so that I can begin the revision process. I’m happy to be as far along as I am, and I’m glad I participated in NaNoWriMo. How about you? Did you try it, and did you find it worthwhile?

Warning: Word count at all costs may be bad for the quality of your writing. If you’re absolutely determined to make that 50,000, here’s what I’ve tried so far.

Names: Somewhere around day nine, I started getting creative with names. Lots of characters needed hyphenated names, and boy oh boy, am I ever good at coming up with those!

Dialog: However, there’s a limit to how much word space you can occupy with names, so around day 11, I added in a character that’s just like the next door neighbor you park in the alley and climb over the back fence to avoid.

You know the kind of person I mean– the one who can spin a single sentence announcement, “Bob and I went to dinner at Trough-O-Rama with Buddy and Sue” into a fifteen minute dialog, complete with blow by blow description of the event plans, from the first moment of phone tag to the final discovery of water spots on the flatware (imagine!).

I’ve cultivated the art of climbing back fences, but I’ve been caught often enough that I decided I could boost my word count by adding in the gabby neighbor. That lasted until I died of boredom on page three of the monologue about the rude salesperson at Walmart (imagine!).

Correspondence: Correspondence is not dead! E-mail can be artistic! Therefore, I’ve included a few of her relevant letters in the text.

Blog posts: If all else fails, there are blog posts to paste in. I’m sure they’ll contribute the quality of the story.

Unfortunately, even with all these ideas, my word count just dropped because I can’t stand writing horridly. Ugh! Once I peeled out the extras, I’m nowhere near my word count goal. Maybe if I added this post to the story?

The results from the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in, and writer David McKenzie of Federal Way, Washington has won. He submitted this gem:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Ouch.

Of course, there’s no hint of irony in my identification of McKenzie as a writer. I sincerely believe that in order to compose something that treads so heavily on literary conventions, he must, in his real life, be a competent writer. You can’t intelligently break rules unless you know what they are.

I have to confess that I have moments of feeling sorry for Bulwer-Lytton, a writer whose name is inextricably linked to purple prose. On the other hand, he has something that few other melodramatists achieve: lasting fame. Thanks to Snoopy and the annual Contest, it will always be “a dark and stormy night” in Bulwer-Lytton’s world.

You may read other entries to the 2009 Contest at www.Bulwer-Lytton.com/2009.htm . If you find yourself inspired by these entries, be sure to enter the 2010 contest at www.Bulwer-Lytton.com.