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locker_monsterWhoot! I'm officially a NaNoWriMo 2009 winner!
So I had no life there for about two weeks. All I did was write. Wrote at work, wrote when I got home, wrote on the weekends. I think constantly writing is good, if you can manage it. I’m a social hermit and my job can be slow at times so I got a lot done. That might not be the case for other people. I think it depends on your story, too. If you have a good idea it’s easy to rattle off 1667 words or more.
For awhile there, in the middle of my story, I had no idea where it was going. I just wrote whatever came to me and hoped I could tie it all together in the end. But by doing that, I think it did change my ending. I suddenly had all these dangling elements and I wanted to use them somehow. If some random person did read my story (heaven help them), it probably seems like I had planned stuff from the beginning but most of it I came up with on the fly. I did a lot of my research on the fly, too, which guarantees a lot of my facts are probably inaccurate. I took a lot of liberties with my setting, but the general idea is still intact.
The mental space you have to get into, “Must write or die” was kind of refreshing. I stopped thinking about whether what I was writing was stylistically engaging or not. I always stress over that, about whether the sentence I just wrote was boring or not. I also freak out if I use he or she to start a sentence too many times. It shouldn’t matter as long as you get the point across. The reader isn’t going to care if three sentences in a row all start with “He” or “She”. I hope to carry this over into my other writing. A lot of fics get bogged down because I think too much.
I also found it’s a lot easier playing in your own world with your own characters. A character isn’t out of character because it’s completely up to you how a character behaves. You don’t have to adhere to something that’s been pre-determined, which also messes me up when I’m writing fic. I don’t know how believable my characters are though. I watch way too much TV and everyone probably sounds like their spouting dialogue from a script, not speaking like normal people do.
Now that I’m finished, I had a chance to read over what I wrote and it doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. What now though? Leaving my novel to gather dust on my hard drive doesn't bother me, but it feels like I should do something with this thing.
So I had no life there for about two weeks. All I did was write. Wrote at work, wrote when I got home, wrote on the weekends. I think constantly writing is good, if you can manage it. I’m a social hermit and my job can be slow at times so I got a lot done. That might not be the case for other people. I think it depends on your story, too. If you have a good idea it’s easy to rattle off 1667 words or more.
For awhile there, in the middle of my story, I had no idea where it was going. I just wrote whatever came to me and hoped I could tie it all together in the end. But by doing that, I think it did change my ending. I suddenly had all these dangling elements and I wanted to use them somehow. If some random person did read my story (heaven help them), it probably seems like I had planned stuff from the beginning but most of it I came up with on the fly. I did a lot of my research on the fly, too, which guarantees a lot of my facts are probably inaccurate. I took a lot of liberties with my setting, but the general idea is still intact.
The mental space you have to get into, “Must write or die” was kind of refreshing. I stopped thinking about whether what I was writing was stylistically engaging or not. I always stress over that, about whether the sentence I just wrote was boring or not. I also freak out if I use he or she to start a sentence too many times. It shouldn’t matter as long as you get the point across. The reader isn’t going to care if three sentences in a row all start with “He” or “She”. I hope to carry this over into my other writing. A lot of fics get bogged down because I think too much.
I also found it’s a lot easier playing in your own world with your own characters. A character isn’t out of character because it’s completely up to you how a character behaves. You don’t have to adhere to something that’s been pre-determined, which also messes me up when I’m writing fic. I don’t know how believable my characters are though. I watch way too much TV and everyone probably sounds like their spouting dialogue from a script, not speaking like normal people do.
Now that I’m finished, I had a chance to read over what I wrote and it doesn’t seem as bad as I thought. What now though? Leaving my novel to gather dust on my hard drive doesn't bother me, but it feels like I should do something with this thing.
