Tuesday, November 11, 2008

why i was never a juggler (22,463 words so far)

Day #9 of my Nanowrimo run
Words today (so far): 2448
Words, total: 22, 463… The half-way mark is in sight!
Mood/status: Bewildered but happy.
Today’s Nano trick: A laundry break clears the brain.

My cold ran its course in two days flat, thank goodness! I slept, wrote a few thousand words, and slept some more. And thus passed the weekend…

As for the content of those few thousand words? Well, I have my revising cut out for me. Makes me love, afresh, that the focus during Nanowrimo is on quantity, not quality.

And how exactly do I crank these words out? Every few nights, I shuffle my outline around and print the next few pages, with the goal of spinning them into prose in my next sessions. And I suppose I should say that “outline” is a super-loose term. Basically I have forty pages of paragraphs describing scenes or partial scenes or even just scraps of dialogue… all stuck in a roughly chronological order. But buried in those paragraphs is all that I need—so far—to go for pages and pages…

My real goal for November is to finish writing Part Three, not to get to Nanowrimo’s 50,000 words. I’m somewhere between a third and halfway through my outline, though, so I think I’m on track.

The only trouble with this pace + this outline? The prose so far reads like a little kid telling a convoluted story in the midst of distractions. “And then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened (can you believe it?). Then he said this and she got really mad, and then all of a sudden the guy you thought was bad news said something great… And then, a lot later—like a week later—this big thing happened, right out of the blue, it was amazing. Yeah. And then...”

I’m haunted by the giant red-ink “T” that littered my papers in high school: my teacher’s code for “Jenn, do you really think that these two paragraphs connect? Not so much. Add a transition, sweetie.”

But connections, transitions, and juggling my fistfuls of story lines… that can all wait for December. Gingerbread, peppermints, and rehashing Part Three: it all kicks off December 1! Sounds perfect.—jl

NOTE: For anyone interesting in writing… Donald Maass (see my tribute to favorite writerly books) is offering The Career Novelist as a free download on his website! No kidding! This is a brilliant, brilliant book, full of super-practical advice. Go check it out.

Posted by Jenn Langefeld on 11/11 at 07:49 PM
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