And none of them will be the ones I put in this entry.
7:20pm: 21,275 words
- Am I really back at Coffee Society, writing? I was one of the first customers here in 1989. I practically had my own table for years. This was where Darin first asked me out 12 years ago. It hasn’t changed much. Still the black and white stripes around the bar area.
- This is where the NaNoWriMo South Bay writing posse meets on Thursday nights. However, the overflow room (didn’t exist in 1989, came into existence a few years later) is packed to the gills.
- Also, all of their outlets are taken already, so I wouldn’t want to be in there anyhow.
- My current pace is supposed to be two thousand words today, except I missed Monday and haven’t kicked it up a notch to catch up.
- So, tonight’s assignment: four thousand words!
- Maybe I could do three thousand tonight, three thousand tomorrow?
- Must. Bank. Words. Ahead. Of. Holiday.
- I am sitting next to a table of De Anza students who are in a Children’s Literature class. They are watching the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat movie as an assignment.
- I am definitely getting the idea that this movie is not appropriate for children. And that’s just from their reactions.
7:45pm: 21,533 words
- Okay, on the one hand, I’d reached a dead end, I had nowhere to go with this scene. Now, I’ve come up with a plot complication completely out of the blue. Meaning I don’t know what it means either. This is part of the genius of NaNoWriMo. Also, how things completely spiral out of control. Which will it be?
- There are extremely cliched possibilities with this plot complication. I would like to avoid them all. Do I stop and make a list? Hope for divine intervention? Try to inculcate a dream tonight on the subject?
- I have to go to the bathroom, but not until 22,000!
8:13pm: 22,066 words
- 22,000! Must. Pee.
- Crap! Just remembered that I needed to stop at the store to buy bread for the kids’ sandwiches tomorrow! And now that reminds me that I’m a total suburban mom!
8:56pm: 22,895 words
- Whoo hoo! I have achieved a dead body, finally! Considering this is a mystery, that certainly took me long enough. I already know at least 5000 words I’d toss out of this right here, and right now, so maybe I’m not that far off stride for a 75,000 word mystery. But we’re not worrying about that! We’re worrying about word count!
- Once again I am struck by my continual suspicion that everyone else knows how to write a novel! Yes, I am well aware of Somerset Maugham’s 3 rules of the novel (“There are three rules to writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are”) but I know so many people who have written published fiction! What is my problem that I cannot get this process right?
- This is an unproductive line of thought. Must. Stop. Brooding.
9:11pm: 22,895 words
- Crap! Having achieved a dead body, I have apparently written myself into a corner! Why did I do this? More importantly, how do I get out of it? (Basically, the question is, why doesn’t my main character just up and leave town right now and leave the mess of the dead body—not caused by her—far, far behind her?)
- Damn, it is loud in here. Have I found such noise conducive to thought in the past? Wrong, wrong, wrong. I so do not. I want to be home, listening to music, in the warmth and comfort of my own home. I will think upon this plot problem as I drive.
Home:
Okay, on the drive home I realized what I need to do is go back and seed a few scenes that build pressure on the MC to stay, not run away. On the one hand, finding the dead body is supposed to be the end of Act 1, which means adding even more pages previously would push the end of Act 1 even farther away from where it should be. (300 page book, Act 1 comes somewhere near page 75.) On the other hand, this is just for NaNoWriMo, right? Fixing the Shitty First Draft (® Anne Lamott) is a job for NaNoEdMo…or at least, another time.
Whoa, you rock! 4K words, a dead body, and all at Coffee Society?! That’s tough to do! The back room is often packed and always on Thursdays, but back in there it’s possible to shield out a lot of the noise and disappear into the zone: I had minor complications keeping me from attending last night, otherwise I would have joined you. (PS: Thanks for the C.S. history tidbits, I had no idea of its exalted status!)
It would be a correct hunch to cease brooding: that is definitely to be kept for NaNoEdMo, should your prose be worth the attention. But I do find myself heading backwards in the text sometimes during the month, not so much to read and edit (horrors!) but to insert a passage that I realize ooops! should have existed here in the first place to help explain or set up something that suddenly appeared out of nowhere during a frenzied burst of NaNoCreativity. I would deem that completely legal, unless your Inner Editor comes to peer over your shoulder and start pointing out major inconsistencies while you’re adding earlier scenes. (Another alternative, if you aren’t sure you can trust your Inner Editor, is to pop back and insert a line saying something like, “*** This is where there will be that section about why MC is going to stay after finding the body…” and then leave it for now.) Also beware of forcing the page structure on your opus at this point: large sections are likely to be edited out or added in after November, so “page 75” is likely to have no meaning in a couple more weeks.
So, good on ya! And have I demonstrated conclusively yet that one tends to become more wordy in all writing during November? (Padding the word count is a hard habit to break, once you’ve been doing it for a couple weeks…) 😉
No, not 4,000 words last night. Less than 2000. Which means I’m really behind now.
Okay, this is really starting to bug me. I mean, I want to do this. Only, I just want the fun “everybody is doing it at the same time” part, not the actual ‘having to stop writing screenplays long enough to write prose” part.
But who knows? Maybe next year?
Anyway, I’m damned impressed, Diane! (And I’m impressed with another diane, too!)
Whoa, you live-blogged a write-in? And still ended up with 4,000 words?
Man, that’s just awesome.