NaNoWriMo 2009 round-up

[locker_monster]

Whoot! 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.

Comments

[newnumber6.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not having to play by somebody else's rules is one of the benefits of writing your own stuff... although I find myself falling into the opposite trap - unless I watch myself, too many of my characters sound and feel like ME, even if I'm trying to make them not. Usually I let it go while I'm writing, and try to fix it in rewrites, but still, it's on my mind.

(Ironically, one of the ways to help with that is to base a character's personality on a specific character you know well. i just have to be careful not to base TOO much on it so it's just using a personality archetype and not actually being a ripoff... there always seems to be some kind of insane balancing act required fin writing!)

[locker-monster.livejournal.com]

It's a hard balance, trying to make your characters sound normal but distinctive at the same time. I think it's just easier to suspend your disbelief. You're writing a piece of fiction, ergo, these people don't have to seem that real.

Funny you should mention basing characters on other characters. I so did that in this story. I said my novel was a loving rip-off of Forever Knight, right? The two main male characters are very much based on the main character from the show. It's an homage, honest, not lazy writing. ;-)