This always happens in the winter and I am always surprised: I get a bug: a cold, or a cough or a sore throat or a dose of all three with an accompanying headache. But it’s an absolute pest when you come down with something in the middle of trying to write a whole crappy novel in November.
The only thing you can do is eat loads of fruit and drink a lot and tell yourself that you don’t really feel that bad and (have the box of tissues next to the computer) another five hundred words won’t be too difficult to pull off and never mind that you can’t remember what you were going to do next or what your characters decided to do instead of that, which seems to be the way it has been going the last week or ten days. I decide something and the characters say, ‘bugger that for a game of soldiers, you’re not killing me off/ putting me in bed with that moron/ making me catch that train/ make that phone call. NO WAY. I’m doing THIS.’ And I have to run about like a blue arsed fly trying to make sense of what the hell they are all up to. Or not up to.
So I am over the 50k mark but still a long way off from the end of the novel – from the possible conclusion, I should say, and I need to pump out another 30k or so to get there.
I took Snow by Orhan Pamuk back to the library after only one and a half chapters. I think it must be better in the original Turkish but as I don’t read Turkish I’ll never know. But I need a book to read during Nano apart from the non-fiction piled around my bed so I’m re-reading Tobias Hill’s The Cryptographer. It’s been a couple of years and I can only barely remember the plot but I’m mostly reading it for the language anyway.
Some people (writers) avoid reading fiction when they are writing but I’m always writing something. The theory is that if you read too much fiction when you are writing you’ll just end up emulating those writers and lose your own writing voice. I think the answer is to read as widely as possible and write as much as possible. And after all, nothing is created in isolation. Some people might like to think that their writing is unique but it won’t be, everyone is infuenced by someone, whether they realise it or not. And I think it’s better to be influenced by as many different sources as possible. It makes life more interesting an prevents stagnation.
Preventing stagnation during Nanowrimo is of utmost importance too.
Week two is always the most difficult, and for some reason, outside distractions always seem to heap themselves on me during this week, just when I think I’m getting into the swing of things.
I’m going to try and hit thirty thousand today. I’m going to unplug the phone, while I write, which I forgot to do yesterday.
End of week one and I am ahead of myself in terms of words written but I am behind myself with my actual plot. There is an awful lot of irrelevant stuff that is creeping into the text, but I will be able to scratch together some kind of novel from it all afterwardds I think. The characters are coming into their own at last – only taken me 20 thousand words to get them breathing (!) But I have already fallen back on the steamy bedroom scene device to get things moving along. All of it excruciatingly embarrassing for my poor characters and will be severely chopped after NaNoWriMo.
But I feel hopeful about the book now, whereas before I was wondering where on earth it might be leading me. That can all change though.
The first two days of NaNoWrimo have gone better than I expected in terms of word count – I have managed to rack up over 7 thousand words, however I am mired in character building and character background, trying to get the voice of each character before I move on with the action. There is some movement forward in the story, albeit very slowly. I am trying to get as much written as possible so that when I come to edit it all at some point I have something sizable to work with.
Rather predictably, the Nano site is exceedingly slow at in the evening from about tea-time to bed time. In fact so slow that I just keep on getting timed out pages so I am updating my word count in the mornings. It’s not going to give a very accurate picture of my actual daily word count because half of one day will be carried over to the next day, but it averages out in the end. It’s just numbers, the main thing is that I am getting stuff down, printing it out and not reading through it too much. Difficult when you’ve written stuff by hand though.
Even though it’s just the first draft, I still find myself wanting to make it the best that I can as I go along, which is good in a way but might end up slowing me down. I have to constantly remind myself that it doesn’t matter if it’s crap because you can shape the crap into better crap later on.
But I can’t just spend every spare minute typing. I need thinking time as well for the novel to develop, so even though it might seem that the writing is standing still, its moving along all the time. You need to give yourself space to have eureka moments for the plot, which makes it more of an exciting journey.
And I’ve just got Orhan Pamuk’s ‘Snow’ out of the library to read during the month. I did want to get My Name is Red, but typically they didn’t have it.
A good start to the NaNoWriMo high speed novel. I woke up at ten to six this morning and despite trying, couldnt get back to sleep so I grabbed my notebook and began writing the insistent voice that was bugging me. At least I know who one of my characters is now and what nationality he is. I found another character this afternoon as well, a female – and they both have names too, so I am less nervous about the whole thing, especially as I have gone over my daily quota to hit 50k by the end of the month.
A few irritating things happening with the laptop not saving stuff as I would expect it to but I’ll have to work around that.
I’ve noticed that the site is s l o w in the evenings too, so I’ll have to steer clear of it in order not to waste writing time. Besides, my partner wants to get on the internet in the evenings anyway.
