A few posts ago, I told how I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month this year, but with a twist. I'm writing a 5,000 word story instead of the usual 50,000 word novel. That works out to 167 words per day. For someone like me, with a lot of different projects happening at once, it's a more realistic goal. So how am I doing, halfway through?
I'm pleased to say that I've gotten further than I did in my last NaNoWriMo attempt. That is, I've actually started to write a story! For the first week or so, I was winning -- thanks to the three-quarters of a page I wrote before the month even started, I was ahead of the word count.
However, this turned out to be a bit of a double-edged sword. On a day when I was feeling tired, I felt like I could take a break. I was feeling a bit depressed due to some unrelated issues, and one day turned into five, until I was behind again. Strangely, this turned out to be a motivating factor for me to start writing again. I needed to get back to that place I was before. I needed to believe that I can do it. The voices in my head were still telling me it's a terrible story, but I thought to myself, a terrible story is better than no story!
In the beginning, I was reading through what I'd already written and noting down changes before I started writing anything new. As the story grew to a page and more, I realised this wasn't going to be feasible. It was taking too long and distracting me. Editing can wait until later! If there are any words or phrases I'm not completely happy with, I use the highlight function in Microsoft Word (or just circle them if I'm writing by hand) to mark them, and just keep on going.
In fact, after having listened to lots of podcasts and read even more articles, the best advice I've heard is just that. Just keep going! It's been presented in many forms by many people, but what it boils down to is: just keep writing! It doesn't matter how bad you think it is. You can always fix it later.
I also decided to write an outline, which helped me to get the story straight in my mind. It made me realise there are actually two intertwined plots, and that helped, though I'm still not sure in which order things are going to happen. Hopefully that will come together at some point.
And hopefully I'll have good news (i.e. a finished story) in a couple of weeks!
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