My goal for this effort was to actually write the stuff I didn’t write last year. The conceit of the project is The Magician’s Journey. We know the Hero’s Journey or some “best-seller-in-a-box” checklist version of it. It is tied to Jungian archetypes (probably very loosely) and I thought about another archetype of the Magician. If the Hero’s Journey is about what the protagonist needs to become the hero, then what does the protagonist need to become a Magician? (Or a King, or a Lover, or even a Warrior, which is the “mature” version of the hero)?
Worse, the Magician of my story would not be the protagonist of most of the story. The project consists of several stories, maybe 4 to 6 novellas, where he is an ally or an opponent in the story, and only the last story would actually focus on him. This meant I had to do something I personally find very difficult in my writing: Finishing the draft.
You can’t what isn’t edited. You can’t edit what isn’t finished.
So while I “won” NaNoWriMo by writing every day (except today) and passing the 50K mark on the 29th, I did not “win” because I now have three unfinished stories.
Sometimes I hate myself and my process.
So the takeaways from this year are as follows:
- Writing every day is good for me. My work life feels generally out of control. You know those studies that claim most people only work 3 out of 8 hours a day, that is, only 3 hours of an 8-hour day are “productive”? I regularly pull 10 productive hour days. I don’t stop. I eat lunch while I work. I do not take breaks. At least writing first thing in the morning is something I can control.
- I am not a Pantser. I did a bit of work on fleshing out plots but not down to the scene level, so while I knew where the story had to be at the end of each scene, I couldn’t fake my way there. I didn’t have the right reasons, my characters meandered, looking for a path. I don’t think they were taking over, as some writers report, but they were kind of directionless. I did come up with a story idea and thought “what the hell, I’ll go for it” and wrote about 7K on a story that I kind of knew where it was going but I suspect 5K of it is worthless. Maybe some scraps of world building in there, but not story stuff.
- I am not a character-first writer. I have some stock characters and I try them in different situations.
- I can take weekends off. I found writing every day a bit exhausting. Not giving myself a break is going to wear me out as much as working 10-hour days does. Fortunately I don’t have the pressure of a set wordcount in a set schedule, so my writing time can fall back to plotting, planning, experimenting, etc.
I will probably return to this project, but I think my next writing steps are to take the various “how to plot” resources I have and actually work on getting things down to the scene level details that I need, so when I start to write, I can just write. I have tried this in the past and the pressure of words builds up and breaks and so I write. I need to give myself permission to write these out and then get back to the plotting. I have no problem throwing away words that I don’t need.
As far as the technology goes, I used yWriter7 this year. I don’t need all the bells and whistles it offers, but it forced me to write on only one machine. This helped with discipline. I could still write things out of order and know I could keep things straight in the end. Simon’s software is suitable for his plotting style, not mine. However, I found the software easy enough to use that I may just keep using it for other projects.
Yeah, my instinct is to write my own, but that is the path of madness (and not writing) and it’s pretty useless until I develop a system that actually works for me to reliably generate wordcount.