Hello everyone.
We’re down to the last full week of NaNoWriMo…and what a challenging week! Not only did I have two days where I was planning on really pushing myself to write, I also had to write around Thanksgiving festivities.
I’m not going to lie, at the start of this week, I didn’t know how I was going to reach my writing goal each day. Thankfully, I had a short writing day on Thanksgiving and Friday, two days that I knew I was going to be spending with family. It was the days I was going to be writing 3 and 4 pages, which was scheduled to happen twice during the week, that really had me doubting myself.
On my longer writing days, I changed my strategy for tackling my goals. Normally when I write, I sit down until I’ve written a page, then take a break from it, finding other things to do while I plan out what I want to say in my next page. It takes me on average a half hour to do this, but I always schedule an hour interval when I’m writing, just in case I get stuck on what I want to write (which has happened a lot this project).
For this week, instead of stopping when I wrote a page, I pushed myself to write for the full hour. This was key to reaching my daily goals. Doing this helped me write a page and a half in the time I had regularly allotted for writing. Once, I even managed to write 2 pages, guaranteeing I was at least halfway toward my goal in just one hour. And because I start each off each day writing, that’s a huge confidence boost to start the morning.
I also implemented a new way of writing the chapters mid-week. I’ve been mentioning all the notes I’ve been making for revisions throughout NaNoWriMo. All these planned revisions pointed to one thing: something wasn’t working about the way I was writing the story. I didn’t feel there was an issue with the story itself, because after each writing session, I kept coming up with more ideas of ways to enhance the story and new details to include, a sign that my passion is driven to tell this story.
Already I feel that this change to the writing style is a huge improvement over the way I was forcing the narrative. I’m glad that I’d noticed something was off immediately, and although I would’ve preferred to pinpoint and address what wasn’t working, it’s encouraging to see that I finally figured out how to write this story. This will just be something to add to the list of things I’m going to need to change when I work on the next draft. I’ll be talking more about what this change was in a later post.
So I’m going to be really busy when the revisions do start.
This NaNoWriMo has been a tough ride. I think this may be the most difficult first draft I’ve ever cobbled together. I like the challenge.
When I sent the manuscript for I’m Not My Father to my editor, she called to tell me that the chapters that took place in the bar didn’t work for her. The pacing was way off, dragging on far too long. When I was discussing it with her, I agreed with a lot of the points she made, but I also understood that to implement them meant performing a massive overhaul, not just to the chapters that took place in the bar, whittling them down dramatically, but the chapters leading up to it, as now I needed to work in details that needed to be relocated from the bar scenes because they were still relevant to the plot, and do so in a way that they still felt organic to the story.
At first, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it. To be honest, even after spending weeks on it before sending it back to my editor, I still wasn’t sure I’d done it. I felt so relieved and exhilarated when she got back to me saying I’d done it. It’d been a huge challenge for me, and I felt like I’d risen to it.
This has definitely been more challenging, but I keep looking at how my mind keeps coming up with solutions each time I spot problems with the manuscript, and believe that I can rise to meet this challenge too. I love that I’m implementing these changes going forward to start improving the manuscript, and I can’t wait to apply these ideas to the next draft.
Until next time.