Perpetually Unfinished
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Well, I did it. 50,000 words in 30 days. (50,091, actually.) Sorry for the lag in posting-- I've been recovering.
It was easier than I expected.
I'm not sure what I mean by that, exactly. It wasn't easy to sit down and write when I didn't feel like it. It wasn't easy to write well (and a lot of it wasn't written well).
But I did it. And the whole way through, I knew I could do it, and I knew I would do it. And that's pretty darn amazing. Partially because of the sheer willpower of it, which I wasn't sure I was capable of. But also because of the fact that I sat down and wrote thousands of words almost every day for a whole month. I've always liked to think of myself as a writer. But I generally haven't, well, written much.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. My NaNo novel is the first writing of any significant length that I've done in, really, almost a decade. (Has it really been almost a decade since I was fifteen? That's kind of crazy. But it's true; just short of nine years qualifies as "almost a decade," I think.)
Anyway, I've started and stopped on a lot of ideas over the years, but sadly (pathetically?), I've never gotten more than a few pages in, maybe a couple thousand words tops. So strangely enough, the best comparison for this year's work is the fantasy novel I thought I was writing back in 1996. The two sections I wrote on the computer total about 10,000 words, and the parts I scribbled in notebooks were probably another 10,000 or 15,000 more.
Ah, that was an interesting piece of work. It was largely unoriginal and ripped off all the fantasy books I was reading at that age, especially but not limited to Dennis McKiernan's "Caverns of Socrates." It was melodramatic, at least the parts I actually got around to writing-- lots of injuries and pain with the accompanying tender angst-filled sorrow of friends. (See Exhibit A, complete with a dead character conveniently brought back to life.) But that was nothing compared to the fact that the main characters were slightly altered versions of me and my classmates to fit a fantasy setting (actually, technically, the characters were us), which is really kind of weird.
Yet despite it all, skimming through it, it really isn't too bad. I mean, it's certainly not good, I don't think, but it's better than I remembered. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder what my writing would be like now, if I'd kept it up on a more regular basis.
Well, I'm going to try that now. If I can write 50,000 words in one month-- and it could've been 60,000, really, if I hadn't had to travel so much-- then I can certainly write, say, 15,000 words every month. So I'll give that a shot, starting in January, and we'll see how it goes.
Wish me luck, and next time hopefully I'll manage to write about somethiing other than writing.
It was easier than I expected.
I'm not sure what I mean by that, exactly. It wasn't easy to sit down and write when I didn't feel like it. It wasn't easy to write well (and a lot of it wasn't written well).
But I did it. And the whole way through, I knew I could do it, and I knew I would do it. And that's pretty darn amazing. Partially because of the sheer willpower of it, which I wasn't sure I was capable of. But also because of the fact that I sat down and wrote thousands of words almost every day for a whole month. I've always liked to think of myself as a writer. But I generally haven't, well, written much.
I was actually thinking about this the other day. My NaNo novel is the first writing of any significant length that I've done in, really, almost a decade. (Has it really been almost a decade since I was fifteen? That's kind of crazy. But it's true; just short of nine years qualifies as "almost a decade," I think.)
Anyway, I've started and stopped on a lot of ideas over the years, but sadly (pathetically?), I've never gotten more than a few pages in, maybe a couple thousand words tops. So strangely enough, the best comparison for this year's work is the fantasy novel I thought I was writing back in 1996. The two sections I wrote on the computer total about 10,000 words, and the parts I scribbled in notebooks were probably another 10,000 or 15,000 more.
Ah, that was an interesting piece of work. It was largely unoriginal and ripped off all the fantasy books I was reading at that age, especially but not limited to Dennis McKiernan's "Caverns of Socrates." It was melodramatic, at least the parts I actually got around to writing-- lots of injuries and pain with the accompanying tender angst-filled sorrow of friends. (See Exhibit A, complete with a dead character conveniently brought back to life.) But that was nothing compared to the fact that the main characters were slightly altered versions of me and my classmates to fit a fantasy setting (actually, technically, the characters were us), which is really kind of weird.
Yet despite it all, skimming through it, it really isn't too bad. I mean, it's certainly not good, I don't think, but it's better than I remembered. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder what my writing would be like now, if I'd kept it up on a more regular basis.
Well, I'm going to try that now. If I can write 50,000 words in one month-- and it could've been 60,000, really, if I hadn't had to travel so much-- then I can certainly write, say, 15,000 words every month. So I'll give that a shot, starting in January, and we'll see how it goes.
Wish me luck, and next time hopefully I'll manage to write about somethiing other than writing.
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