NaNoWriMo Wrap-up
I have officially experienced the bang-fizzle, which is to say I started with a bang, then fizzled after only eight days.
Bang-fizzle is my newly coined word, by the way.
Thankfully, I did get a lot done in the the eight days though, and I’m more than 28,000 words into the novel, so it’s not like it was a waste of time, not at all. It was definitely worth it.
But writing that much daily meant my hands and arms were killing me and desperately needed some rest. Plus, I had to create some builds and videos for my YouTube channel. Then came the U.S. election, then other stuff came up, then it was Thanksgiving before I knew it, then Christmas decorating after that. You get the idea. And, once I stopped writing, enough came up that I lost my groove, got out of the head space, and didn’t return to it prior to the end of the month.
I’m still not there yet either, not in the right mental place for writing, and I’ve found it extremely challenging to write when I’m experiencing high stress and my mind is in an overactive state. Some might be able to use writing as an escape from this type of brain activity. For me, not so much. It’s best if I start out in a good place, one where I’m a bit of an emotional blank slate, where I’m open enough and centered/balanced enough that I can move into the heads of my characters to feel what they’re feeling. It’s how I write dialogue. My husband calls it method-writing - like method acting, only applied to writing. It makes me chuckle, but he does have a point.
Regardless of what the character I’m writing is feeling, even if it’s on the negative end, like anger or anxiety, I experience those emotions as I write the scene. And I’ll experience them to enough of an degree that physical manifestations will often result - muscle tightening for an anger laden scene, or an increased heart rate for a high anxiety scene, for instance. Putting myself in the character’s shoes and feeling what their feeling in this manner allows me to “react” the way the character would react, with dialogue, in particular, generally flowing pretty freely.
But I digress, as usual, and we’d better get onto my final standings.
| Daily Word Goal 2,251 - 2,418 | Total Word Goal 80,000 - 85,000 | # needed to be on track | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date | Words written | Current Word Count | to meet goal |
| Nov 1 | 2,684 | 15,162 | 14,813 |
| Nov 2 | 1,819 | 16,981 | 17,148 |
| Nov 3 | 1,093 | 18,074 | 19,943 |
| Nov 4 | 1,635 | 19,709 | 21,818 |
| Nov 5 | 1,777 | 21,486 | 24,153 |
| Nov 6 | 2,564 | 24,053 | 26,488 |
| Nov 7 | 2,324 | 26,357 | 28,823 |
| Nov 8 | 1,733 | 28,090 | 31,158 |
So, I’m about a third of the way through my first draft. Not bad. I’m going to keep this daily tracker too, sans dates, when I start writing again. And I feel like that might be sometime soon. Fingers crossed. I’d still like to finish the first draft by year’s end. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen now, but maybe I’ll get close.
I haven’t yet decided if I want to continue to post these updates as I write, but I’m strongly considering it. It’s become a diary of sorts that I might enjoy reading sometime down the road.
