Christmas Novel Writing Update

I’m celebrating.

Why am I celebrating? Well, I’m celebrating because Christmas brought about the right frame of mind for writing. Where are the hats and horns?

Oh wait, we have several more days before we break those out.

Regardless, the point is that I’ve spent time working on Book 2 recently. I completed nearly two full edits in two days and I feel pretty good about that. It was something I needed to do to get myself immersed back into the story. Of course, I have to shift gears and do a YouTube video, probably tomorrow. Nonetheless, it was good to get back into it for a couple of days.

And now that I’m a little removed from NaNoWriMo and have spent a couple of days working on the novel again, I’m able to reflect on the whole NaNoWriMo experience a little more. But first, I’ll post my stats so far.

	NaNoWriMo Daily Word Goal 2,251 - 2,418	Total Word Goal 80,000 - 85,000
Date	Words written	Current Word Count
< Oct 28	9,435	9,435
Oct 28	2,719	12,154
Oct 31	324	12,478
Nov 1	2,684	15,162
Nov 2	1,819	16,981
Nov 3	1,093	18,074
Nov 4	1,635	19,709
Nov 5	1,777	21,486
Nov 6	2,564	24,053
Nov 7	2,324	26,357
Nov 8	1,733	28,090
Dec 25	300	28,503
Dec 26	329	28,832

I removed the NaNoWriMo goal column and added a couple of days of data I had from October. Unfortunately, I don’t have the data for the 9,435 words I wrote prior to October 28th. However, I’m going to make a rough guess that I spent somewhere between one to two weeks writing that. An average of that leaves me with a 10-day span. So, the total number of writing days, in the end, will be the day count reflected in my chart plus 10.

One thing you might notice in the chart above is that the word counts for the two most recent days are low. That’s because they were editing endeavors, not writing endeavors.

Mind you, the proverbial and all-knowing “they” say you shouldn’t edit while you write, that you should complete writing the novel in its entirety before you edit. Well, I tried that during NaNoWriMo and it’s not my style. Not at all. It’s simply not what works for me.

This is not to poo-poo NaNoWriMo. I think NaNoWriMo is probably excellent for people who need a push to get through writing a novel. I, however, am not one of those people. I don’t need a push to write. The only thing I need is to be in the correct frame of mind. That’s my one requirement. I can’t be highly stressed. I have to be clear-headed enough to immerse myself so I can feel what the characters are feeling. Beyond that, I need no push. So, though I found NaNoWriMo to be somewhat fun, and it gave me a great sense of accomplishment, especially in regard to the speed at which I was making my way through the novel, I did also find it to be a somewhat frustrating challenge.

Let me explain.

As you probably already know or have gathered, when you participate in NaNoWriMo, you have a certain daily word count goal. This goal, in my opinion, lends itself well to doing what I mentioned above - writing straight through and editing on the back end.

But the way I like to write is to start my day by rereading one or more chapters before I write anything new. In the beginning stages of the book, I seem to prefer reading the novel in its entirety - and I’m editing in every read through too, simply because I can’t help but do so. I’m also doing a few other very important things; one big one is reading for flow.

This, to me, encompasses many things. How is the story going? Is it interesting enough? How does it feel emotionally? Are there any lulls? Does the dialogue sit well? Is there anything that doesn’t feel natural? Is there anything that needs more detail?

So, there are a lot of things I’m looking at and for, but I’d have to say that the most important thing for me is to get into the flow and emotion of it. I’ve got to be sitting in the groove of it, if you will, to write the next new section. But when you’re participating in NaNoWriMo and you’re trying to reach a pretty heavy-duty daily word count, you don’t have the time to re-read previous chapters to make sure you’re in the pocket. You must simply dive in and press on. And I was doing that as best I could, but I felt a bit like I was throwing darts in the dark. I wasn’t sure if what I was writing was hitting the target or even sticking in the board.

Then there’s another negative I noticed about NaNoWriMo’s word count driven goal; it makes me far too hesitant to cut things I should cut. For instance, in tonight’s edit, I cut a section of nearly 400 words. I’m not sure I would have cut that during NaNoWriMo. That’s no bueno. If you can cut, you should cut.

Then there are other tasks that are highly beneficial that don’t add to word count at all. I spent some significant time on one of those tonight. That task was adding to my character list, which includes notes regarding each character’s physical description, their motivations, values, fears, etc. This particular list wasn’t as necessary to keep updated during Book 1 as it’s becoming now. But as I add more characters to the series, there’s more to keep track of, and these types of notes are becoming more necessary. So I decided that, since I was doing re-reads and it was at least somewhat fresh in my mind, I should start filling in some details on my character sheet. That’s also something I would have skipped during NaNoWriMo as it’s a time-consuming task that doesn’t add to your word count. Yet, it’s a task that I think is probably unavoidable if you’re writing a series - unless, of course, you have an absolutely remarkable memory for details.

In any case, now that I’m no longer participating in NaNoWriMo and I’m back to working on my novel at my own pace, I feel a lot more relaxed about it. I can take my time, and that’s nice. That said, me taking my time writing is probably a bit different than other people taking their time writing. It did take me only 2.5 months to write the first novel. I spent another couple of months editing after I completed the manuscript for a grand total of 4.5 months, start to finish, before pushing it out to beta readers. I’ve completed 23 days of writing this novel and I’m probably about 1/3 of the way through it. That puts me at the same pace as when I wrote the last one, only I’ve broken this up much more instead of writing it straight through. Nonetheless, this data indicates that, if I sit down and write for roughly 50 more days, I’ll complete the manuscript. I’m interested to see if that holds true.

I’m also interested in tracking my process along with my timeline for this new novel. I’m doing that with these blog posts, plus comments inserted into the spreadsheet where I’m storing all my novel related data and notes. I figure it will give me an idea of just how much editing I’m doing during the writing process, how much time I’m spending on external tasks like updating character lists and outlines, and also about how many words I write a day when I’m not doing it under pressure. My guess right now is that it’s going to average around 1,200. We’ll see how close I am.