Observations From Three Days of National Novel Writing Month
At the beginning of the month, I announced that I was taking part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I wound up delaying my writing start by two weeks, choosing November 15-December 15 as my month-long writing period.
There were a couple of specific reasons for starting in the middle of the month. First, I hadn’t learned about NaNoWriMo until the month started, so I felt like I was behind from the start. Second, I’ve already been working on a novel for several months, and I wanted to do a month-long project with a fresh idea.
So I’ve been at it for three days now, and it seems like I’ve spent every free moment working on this thing. I’m about 6,700 words in — a little ahead of the 1,667 word-per-day pace to get 50,000 words written in 30 days. I’m a big fan of my concept, and it’s been exhilarating seeing this thing come together so quickly.
But I’ve also noticed some things about writing this novel, and here are the observations I’ve made about my own fast novel-writing experience.
I’m terrible at writing dialogue. I don’t know what it is, but getting the hang of writing dialogue, especially small talk, is tough for me. Maybe that’s something that’ll get better with time.
I’m writing a lot of scenes in restaurants. Good Lord, these characters love to eat! It’s a fun way to make some of the conversation-writing easier. Besides, who doesn’t love a good restaurant scene?
Letting the plot unfold in real time is liberating. With this one, all I started out with was the most basic premise, and I’m writing the plot details as I go. With the first novel, which I’m also still working on, I had more details mapped out, which has proven more difficult that I thought. So writing on the fly is surprisingly fun!
It’s a blast working real places that I know and love into a fictional setting. This novel takes place largely around Athens, so I’ve had a great time giving real places a shout-out and creating scenes in actual locations that I’m fond of. It gives this novel a touch of verisimilitude — at least for me.
So far this has been really fun, and I’m hoping it stays that way. I’ll keep sharing updates as I go through this wild and crazy process, and I might even get brave enough to share some excerpts.
Feel free to drop questions or encouragements in the comments.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash