When characters send you to Coventry…

So, there I was, hopeful of catching up with NaNoWriMo, adapting a short story that I wrote for A363 which was well-received. I knew this one would take a lot more research as it involves a lot of aspects I have little or no knowledge of and was also set in the present day – not my comfort zone. I was fine-ish with this, although managing to do enough research to get 50,000 words done for NaNo was going to be ‘challenging’.

Then the protagonist flatly refused to speak to me when I had reached a measly 4k. I obediently sat at the pc each day, willing him to get out of whatever tantrum he was in over whatever point in the story he was objecting to. But nope, he was done with me. I was fired.

Fine, I thought. I’ll just go back to a protagonist I know inside out, whose tantrums I can deal with and know I can get around. A sequel to TSC? Whyever not? I had always planned to write a series of books with Quinn and Co., and being immersed in a medieval-style fantasy setting suits me far better than modern-day wherever-it-was. Matthew and his murderous tendencies will just have to go on a gap year and pull themselves together.

But what about plot for the sequel? *Insert mild panic here*

I opened Ywriter. I created a chapter. I created a scene. I put Quinn into that scene, waking early on a summer’s day. He did the rest.

8,608 words later, not only do I have a plot, but I have a plot that ties in really well with some of the events in TSC, removing some of the worries I had about whether it would follow on smoothly from the first book or look like a rushed idea with no roots or substance.

I’m still way behind in terms of NaNo – my finishing date at my current rate is January 15th – but I will catch up. I have a really good working relationship with these characters, and although I know there are bound to be times when Quinn and Co. pull a total strop on me and have me tearing my hair out, we will get through it.

The moral of this little story?

Write what you LOVE!

I have some catching up to do!

After my blog the other day about not giving up on NaNoWriMo, I almost had to give up on it myself – not because of confidence issues or anything relating to my novel or the challenge itself, but because my PC decided to have a meltdown. Not being the most technically-minded of souls, it got worse and worse until I ended up reinstalling Windows altogether.

I could have cried. Many of my photos are still on the memory card of my camera, and stored on my phone, and loads are posted to Facebook so I can retrieve them. I also backed up the really important documents (my entire debut novel, for one!) and also emailed them to a friend for extra safety. But everything else has gone.

I finally managed to get my PC back to some degree of its former self this morning. This is a bit of a triumph for me as most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing. Computer stuff is a foreign language to me these days, despite being self-taught in the use of them since around 1998. But evidently I still have much to learn.

As far as NaNo goes, I managed to save what I already had and as it’s still only 5th November, I’m confident I can catch up. Just cross every digit you possess for me, that nothing else goes wrong with the PC.

I don’t want to end up experimenting on it – how many hits from a 4ft bastard does it take to smash up the tower..?

NaNoWriMo – 610 words of warning…

I want to wish everyone luck with NaNoWriMo, of course. But I also want to issue a few words of warning…

You’re about to attempt to write 50,000 words in a month. 1,667 words per day. Of course you can be flexible and have days off – nobody expects you to have 30 days where life doesn’t get in the way of your progress. But if you’re enjoying your writing it’s not that hard to catch up. So I could offer a few words of encouragement about that and tell you not to worry if on day one your car breaks down, your child is sick all over your best carpet and that friend you haven’t seen for ages phones you up and keeps you talking for three hours.

But I won’t. I think the greatest danger to any NaNo participant (especially first-timers) is their own inner critic.

You’ll sit at your desk, fuelled by copious amounts of tea/cake/chocolate/cigarettes. You’ll have ideas in your head that play like a blockbuster movie. You’ll have characters planned out that you already love, even if they probably won’t do as their told at various points in the story. You’re ok with that – or you should be.

You churn out 1,667 words on average over a few days, maybe even a week. And then you read back through your work and decide it’s utter rubbish. Your inner critic has laughed at you.

And your inner critic has killed any chance you have of finishing stone dead.

But you can silence this monster. All you have to do is remember that it’s a first draft. It’s not meant to be perfect! It’s like a piece of clay you are working on…it will look odd, maybe not even look remotely like the beautiful pot you had planned to shape from it. You may think a five-year-old could do better. But you know it’s not done yet, so you wouldn’t just chuck that away, would you?

I started writing The Soul Conductor at Camp NaNo in August 2012. I’ve only just finished it, over two years later. I had to change an awful lot from that original draft in that time. I even had to completely rewrite the latter third of it. It is very different from the first version. It’s more than twice the original length at 127,000 words. But I now have a novel I am very happy with, and characters I can’t imagine not having in my writing life!

When I look back at NaNo I am able to see it for what it is – an excellent springboard for getting the initial ideas down in a kind of organised format, instead of jumbled up in my head in fragmented scenes. I’m sure some of you have written notes all over the place for your novel, too. NaNo will get all those things written down in a form that will make it far easier for you to work on.

It will be a lot of work. You have to be honest with yourself and decide whether you really want to do it. If you do, give that inner critic a good thrashing and tell it to p*ss off. It’s a first draft. You have all the time in the world to turn it into the polished work of fiction you have been imagining it can be. And the feeling you’ll get when you have a finished novel you are happy with is far greater than any other sense of achievement I’ve ever experienced!

But you can’t create that polished work of fiction if you give up and throw it all away because you think it’s rubbish.

So don’t. Just don’t.