Done. Wrote a novel in a month. I added the final few words last night at about 9PM, brining the total word count of my NaNoWriMo novel, Ziggurat, up to 50,370.

The last week of writing was actually pretty relaxed. I wrote a big pile of text early in the week, so I only needed to write a few hundred words each night as the month came to a close. I have noticed over the course of the process that I’ve actually started writing a lot faster as well, which is a bonus, and half the point of undertaking the experiment in the first place. I’m fairly sure I can bust out a thousand words faster now than I could at the start of the month. The actual quality of those words is, at the moment, an unknown entity.

Current word count: 36,065

One thing’s for certain; I find it difficult to stick to any sort of schedule. I’m not sure how many weeks it’s actually been since I started writing this, but it feels more like 3 than 2.

The NaNoWriMo people break the challenge down into a totally-manageable-sounding 1,667 words per day, I target I have so far completely failed to stick to. Instead, I seem to write in bursts;  today, according to their stats, I’ve written 4,994 words.  Over the weekend, I managed to write no words at all.

So this isn’t exactly running like clockwork, but it is definitely going somewhere. (more…)

This November I am going to be taking part in National Novel Writing Month. What this entails is, quite simply, writing a 50,000 word draft of a novel by the end of the month. If that seems like a hell of a lot of words to write in a month, well, it is. But it should be a good challenge, and hopefully a useful writing exercise.

I have a very loose idea of the novel I’m going to write – about the lives of people living inside an infinitely tall tower in some distant future – but I’ve not got much more than that. There’s no overriding plot yet, and it’s possible there won’t be by the end either; this might end up being more of a tumbling together of disparate ideas and story threads than one cohesive plot.

I’m going to approach the whole thing like a free-writing exercise – just sit down with an idea in mind, and write the first thing that comes to mind. And then keep writing until I either hit the word count, reach the end of the month, or my ideas dry up completely.

It’s a new approach to writing for me – I tend to start writing with a definite idea of at least the main characters, and the important plot points mapped out in my head before I even begin typing. I’m going to try and come up with something more organic, more instinctual, driven by the pressures of a very tight writing schedule. We’ll see how that plays out in a month’s time.

I could come out with something great. It could end up being the novel of the century. More likely, perhaps, it will end up being incoherent rubbish. Or I’ll run out of things to write a week in and the whole exercise will be a dismal failure. Still, I like the idea of starting off a month with a stem of an idea, and ending the month with 50,000 words of something. Whether it’s any good or not is almost beside the point.

I’ll endeavour to provide semi-regular progress updates – though I’m bound to not actually do this, as a result of spending all my time writing and forgetting to post anything at all – and eventually the finished article, however successful, will be available here.

See you in December!

Editing. I will never fail to underestimate the amount of work that has to go into editing anything, ever. I think it’s partly because I don’t like editing. I like creating things, forging new paths of prose, not picking over a load of boring old words that I’ve already written.

Trouble is, all those paths of prose I’ve forged often end up being ungainly, badly worded and full of errors. So editing has to happen. In the case of Answer, lots of it.

I don’t ever again want to give myself such a big editing job as I did on Answer. Now, I edited all through the writing process, often hacking out huge chunks of narrative, as previously discussed. The end result was still a big ungainly manuscript badly in need of a lot of editing. (more…)