The NaNo pep talks from OLL central and my local Municipal Liaison keep on arriving in my inbox. I have to say I prefer the local version; my ML was only a thousand words ahead of me at the last count, which is always cheering to read. (Believe me, I read and re-read emails that cheer.)
Confession of the week: We’re past the half-way point, and I haven’t reached five figures yet. Shhh!
I should point out that I haven’t really been giving NaNoWriMo my all, and will probably continue to not do so even unto the final week. Little things… like hospital appointments and googling what they’re planning to do to me next… planning how best to avoid a future stroke…. working out what caused the last one…. monitoring and diarising everything I eat or drink or smoke or exert energy towards… I’m discovering that ill health takes up a whole lot of time, not to mention a wholly unattractive level of self-obsession.
So, just lately I spend most of my days out in the garden, muscling bramble roots out of the soil (today’s winner was almost an inch thick and three feet underground), or planting next year’s fruit crops, or building and filling raised beds for the vegetables I plan on planting in the Spring, insh’Allah. I come into the house tired and aching when it goes dark at 4.30pm, resist the temptation to pour a stiff whisky and puff my way through several cigarettes, make myself a nice cup of tea instead and sit down to figure out what it is I should theoretically be eating for dinner that night. Sometimes it matches up with reality, oft-times not–too much salt, tonight, by far. But something is changing despite it all, if slowly; my eyesight’s finally back to full strength, after three weeks of living in a blurred universe, and I don’t have to avoid strong light any more.
I’m watching a lot more TV than usual–God I hate TV, it sucks the soul out of us all–but despite this waste of my evenings I do write something most nights when I turn in, whereas I’d normally be reading or re-reading some novel or other until it dropped from my unconscious hands. This small concession to the literary lifestyle is one concession more than I have been used to making over the last few years, and I’m happy to report that even such a miniscule amount of daily effort is starting to show results. I can now churn out a thousand words without taking hours over them, which means I’m half-way to my personal NaNo goal. Yay!
It’s taken a while, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I really would like to write the novel I set out to write for NaNoWriMo 2010, one day. It won’t happen in a month, though–far from it. It’ll happen at a nice, comfortable pace, somewhere nearer five hundred words a day than two thousand. Even assuming I do eventually regain the ability to write two thousand words in a day, I still wouldn’t want to write the first draft of a novel I cared about at that kind of speed.
Here’s why.
Firstly, I cannot for the life of me switch off my inner editor. I worked as an editor for so long that I couldn’t get any pleasure out of reading for over a year after I quit. I still automatically note the errors in every page I read (and I’m talking about published books here); I can, now, get past the urge to fix the errors and concentrate on the story instead; what I still can’t do is write anything at all without fixing my own typos and rearranging the paragraphs to flow better as I go along.
Secondly, I find it impossible to write something that requires research without actually doing the research! It’s not so many weeks since I wrote here that it would be very freeing to lose that restriction, but actually the opposite is the case. Then again, my NaNo project was based on an historical subject, and while it might be OK to imagine scenes and invent personalities to some extent, it did actually require in-depth knowledge of several key dramatis personae, for example. I’d no problem imagining the protagonist back into life, nor any member of his family, but I was all at sea when it came to his friends and colleagues.
This wouldn’t, of course, be a problem in a novel that had no basis in historical fact. Probably, my choice of subject matter was my first and worst decision when it comes to speed-writing.
Future NaNo-ers, take note! and be sure to write pure fantasy.
