{"id":211,"date":"2019-11-30T19:11:35","date_gmt":"2019-12-01T03:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/?p=211"},"modified":"2019-11-30T19:11:38","modified_gmt":"2019-12-01T03:11:38","slug":"uncle-josh-on-finishing-nanowrimo-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/30\/uncle-josh-on-finishing-nanowrimo-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncle Josh On Finishing NaNoWriMo 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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)? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can’t what isn’t edited. You can’t edit what isn’t finished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes I hate myself and my process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So the takeaways from this year are as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. 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.<\/li>
  2. 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.<\/li>
  3. I am not a character-first writer. I have some stock characters and I try them in different situations. <\/li>
  4. 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. <\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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. … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21],"tags":[22,97],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-nanowrimo","tag-ywriter"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joshuarenglish.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}