I’m still doing it. Here’s the observations I’ve made:
I’ve had a busy weekend, but have kept to the main goal of keeping a daily writing schedule. The weekend saw the visiting of my sister and her entourage, which put a hiccup into Sunday’s writing (managing only 600 words before midnight), but I have been able to make it up for the past two days and am now once again ahead.
My lack of preparation before starting NaNoWriMo is still taking its toll, largely in telling a cohesive and consistent story; this is definitely a first pass word dump, not a refined document. However, as wooden as the dialog and description is, I am starting to see certain themes that will be useful in fleshing out a second draft.
Theory: It seems that a complete exchange of ideas between characters takes me, on average, around 1500-2500 words. That suggests to me that there are 30-50 complete ideas to be conveyed to fill 50,000 words of a novel. A general book outline might then fit on an entire page, describing each idea/premise, and how they follow each other as the book unfolds.
So far, this has been an utterly solo affair. I haven’t talked to another wrimo since attending that first meeting, and I’m finding that this isn’t bothering me. The writing is a personal affair, and just knowing that other people are going through this at the same time is enough for me to feel a sense of connection. I should attend a write-in sometime though to see what it’s like. Perhaps it is actually a lot of fun.
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