Hopefully, not this time. I think the difference now will be that this actually has a purpose, and not random ramblings of "Minnesota winter is fucking cold" and "Midterms suck." Instead, I've decided to use a blog to keep track of my progress during National Novel Writing Month - which I have never tried before.
Why am I participating this year for the first time? Well, I hadn't heard of it until last year, and last year I pretty much just lacked the motivation to get my brain working and commit to almost 2000 words a day. I had also convinced myself that I lacked the time - I figured that 16 credits of classes and ballroom dancing took up too much of my time. This year I am taking a light load of 17 credits, am on the executive board of the ballroom dancing club here at the University of Minnesota and also on the executive board of the Zeta Kappa Chapter of the Phi Sigma Pi National Honor Fraternity. I also have a job as a teaching assistant, an unpaid job in a research lab, and a volunteer job at the local children's hospital. Do I have time to write a novel in a month? No. Am I going to try anyways? Yes. And the reason for this requires a little narrative:
When I was thirteen years old, I wrote a short story for my eighth grade English class. It was a three-page fantasy story about a chick who sacrificed her life to get revenge for the destruction of her home village, blah blah blah. But I was thirteen, and aside from a trio of eight-sentence tales from second grade about a cat named Fuzzy, I had never written a thing before. To my great surprise I got a slew of positive comments on my story, from my teacher, from the classmates who were there when I had to read it aloud... By the end of the day I had decided I was going to turn that story into a novel, and I was determined to someday get it published.
After a month or so I had a three-page prologue written. But it sat there, untouched, for quite some time. I revisited it around my sophomore year of high school, and wrote about 70 pages more over the next year or so. Shortly after finishing what I considered to be part 1 of 6 of my great fantasy novel, I decided I didn't like the direction it was going, and I scrapped it. All of it. I started the prologue completely over, and over a little more time I got the prologue and a couple chapters, totalling around 25 pages. By the time I graduated from high school, I had scrapped it all again.
Since then I have spent close to two years doing nothing but tossing ideas around in my head (I am now a sophomore in college). At one point I wrote out the third incarnation of my prologue, and am currently happy with it. But other than that I have nothing but concepts, ideas, names for characters. I have planned out specific scenes in my head (death, death, death, dramatic realisation, death death death, mass death, death), I have put together some vocabulary and grammatical concepts for a fantastical language, I have puzzled out biographies. But aside from a few sporadic notes, this entire world, with its dynamic characters and history, exists only in my head.
This is where National Novel Writing Month comes in.
For those of you who do not know, National Novel Writing Month is an event during the month of November when writers get together with the common objective of writing a 50,000 page novel in 30 days. The general idea is to start a new novel and just run with it - to work based on quantity rather than quality, to write without thinking or overanalysing. Although I am not beginning a new novel, this is exactly what I need. To have the motivation to write out the ideas in my head without worrying whether I really like the ideas or not, to stop getting hung up on one piece of plot and toss all others to the side. It has been six years since I decided I wanted to be a published fantasy novelist - at this point I almost couldn't care less whether or not my novel gets published, I just want to finish the damn thing. And National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is my path to get there.
However I am taking it one step further. I want to reach 100,000 words, or finish my book (if it ends up being less than 100,000 words) by the end of December - as a comparison, the shortest of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, is about 130,000 words. Also, if you are familiar with the Redwall book series, the first of the series (titled Redwall, of course) is almost exactly 100,000 words. So, the pace I plan to go at is still in accordance with the pace set for NaNoWriMo - I'm just hoping to do it for twice as long.
This is going to be really difficult for me. I have always had problems staying focused on my writing - obviously. And my life aside from my novel is extremely busy. To be perfectly honest, I am expecting myself to get so far behind pace in the first two weeks of the month that I'll quit the thing entirely. But I desperately hope I'm wrong. During my freshman year of high school, I wrote a letter to myself to read after I graduated. In that letter, I told my eighteen-year-old self that I'd better be close to done with my book by then, because four years working on it with no results was shameful. I'm almost twenty now, and by the end of December my middle-school self better be proud of me.
~Alexandra
No comments:
Post a Comment