Day 27 and we’re 90% of the way to NaNoWriMo completion. Not that I’ll have a completed novel at the end of this, but I’ve had another productive day and I’m certainly finishing the month strongly. I’m fairly certain that my revised goal of 25,000 words by day 30 will be achieved and I’m beginning to feel like I have a novel that has some mileage in terms of being worth completing.
I’ve managed to get this far without revealing too much about the novel itself on the blog and that was at least in part driven by the fact that I’ve had no idea where I’ve been going with it for the most part. I’m still not sure where it’ll end up but the general direction of travel does seem to have been established in the last few days. The danger of writing a novel without much of a plan is, I think, the risk of writer’s block hitting at any moment, but the joy of NaNoWriMo and solely focusing on word count (over boring things like plot and character development) is that when you hit a creative wall with one plot device, you can just head off in a different direction, safe in the knowledge that, even if the whole thing makes absolutely no sense, you will,at the very least, have written more words. But looking back on what I’ve written so far, it does seem like I have, almost by accident, established the threads of an overarching plot that might actually work.
And while I haven’t excessively focused on character development, I have found that the characters have rather insisted on developing themselves. I have, more than once, added a character that I intended to be fairly two-dimensional with the purpose of killing them off almost immediately but then the character has, somehow, become more interesting than I meant them to be and all of a sudden they appear to have taken on a bigger role and pushed the story in a far more diverting direction than I had expected.
I’m still far from convinced that I’m in the process of writing a novel that anyone else would ever want to read, but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that it will turn out to be a novel that I would want to read. Alas my tastes are rarely indicative of quality or likelihood of commercial success but if, in the end, the only person who finds merit in my finished novel is me, then I still think it will all have been worthwhile.
But these posts aren’t meant to be about self-indulgent ruminations on the creative process, they’re simply meant to be a way of holding myself to account with respect to my word count. And today the daily word count comes in at an impressive 2594 words, which takes me up to an overall word count of 22749 words.
James Proclaims! 