While we still have people checking the board, I was wondering what Nano taught you as a writer. What can you take away from the process, other than a bunch of words that may/may not see the light of day.
For me, I learned a lot this time. Mostly in two categories:
1 - having an outline results in a much better book. I was a seat-of-the-pants writer, starting with a vague outline and letting the words take me in all sorts of cool directions. The result was fun and interesting and totally different than I expected, but resulted in a book that was single-minded, slowly-paced and meandered a lot.. fun as an exercise but not a way to do anything noteworthy.
Using an outline resulted in a much faster (and slower) write. It was faster because I knew where I was going and I could write the scenes knowing what I wanted to get done, which allowed me to concentrate on making it work the right way, making the characters decent, etc. It was also slower because instead of blazing along and not caring about dialog tags, making them believable, etc. this time I was trying to write "good" and make it a better story, and I found my words/hour was far less than I expected.
2 - the second big thing I learned was that I need a LOT more plotting. I created what I thought was a decent plot, several interesting characters, sub-plots, action, a romance, etc. I thought it would serve me quite nicely. Instead, I hit the end of my story at 50k, and that was by padding things out more than I really wanted to! I can't imagine how many words I will end up with after a couple of edits. So my plot-generation braincells need a lot of work. I also found that by the time I got to the end, I had left it considerably more vague than I needed it to be, which further slowed me as I spent a lot of writing time, trying to figure out what to write - my outline said "hero kills the big monster" but the "how" was left undefined. The whole process left me with an end result that was a weaker ending than I really wanted.
How about you?
Mark
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Mark
73,408 / 50,000
Dec 3, 2007 - 17 01
I learned that I need to be excited about what I'm doing in order to be able to write. Even if I know I like my idea, I still need energy from something, whether it's "OMG Nano!" or I'm just really passionate about a certain character interaction or twist. Justine Musk (moschus on Livejournal) talked about how she needed to know what the emotional core of a scene was before she could get into it. If she didn't know, she couldn't write it, even if she knew what was going to happen. That happened to me about halfway through, and resulted in some scenes that had to be painfully scraped out of my head.