Yesterday was Sunday and the last day of the Thanksgiving break. I wrote 4k on Friday and 5k yesterday to reach 40,000 words. There were some moments last week when I wondered if I had what it takes to finish, but now that the end is near I am excited to finish. I need to write 2250 words each day this week in order to finish by Friday and celebrate with a night of WoW. No problemo.
Things are really coming together now. I pretty much know the fates of all the characters and it is just a matter of telling the rest of the story as outlined.
So far, I have learned the following things in this Nanowrimo:
Heroes who are just decent, stand up, neighborly folks... are boring to write about. It wasn't until I started to flesh out the villains and give them things to do that the writing really took off and I felt like i finally had a novel's worth of ideas.
My rough drafts tend to be mostly narrative. This is something I will have to work on. For Nanowrimo, I suppose it is okay, because I can't really market a 50k novel anyway. What I have is a narrative framework and in the rewrite, I will have to take certain parts and make actual scenes instead of just explaining what happens. I think I will shoot for 80k on the rewrite, unless I get some brilliant idea to take it to 100k. Something to watch out for when it comes time to write on the Neverwoods again.
Also, I find myself consciously padding the language, using the most wordy possible phrases in order to meet the writing deadline. I hope more practice will help curb this. Next year, I will have a better idea of how many phases or scenes I need to flesh out 50k words. This year it was just over 60. I should look at 2006's nanonovel outline to see how many I ended up with. If I can start November with a solid outline at about the right length, then maybe at 10%, I may have enough subject matter that I don't have to pad everything so much.
Perhaps next year I will give myself a gnarlier goal and go for 80k. I hope to learn a lot in the year of editing coming up, so we'll see.
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