Monday, November 24, 2008

Process This

Well, I reached 40k tonight -- a little behind on my personal goal based on 2k a day from Nov. 1, but still within my comfort zone. I've got between now and next Sunday to crank out 10k. Barring any wordless dead zones, I should make it with a little room to spare.

This year's NaNo effort is different than last year in many ways. Foremost is the fact that I finished a complete first draft of this year's novel this past Friday! It came in at around 38k so while I had a rough yet complete manuscript, I did not yet have a winning NaNo word count.

I mentioned that this draft was feeling a little sparse, so what I did was go back to page one and start looking for parts to flesh out. I found close to an additional 2k within the first thirty-three pages so I'm optimistic I'll find 10k in the remaining one hundred and eighty nine. After the end of the month I'll be pushing on, trying to beef it up to around 70k.

Last year, I reached 52k by the end of the month but felt nowhere near the actual end of the story. The finished manuscript for last year's effort came in at around 77k.

I know, lots of boring stats but I have to admit that part of the fun of this challenge is the process.

3 comments:

Michael Tallon said...

You can do it!!!

It's funny how with scripts there's always more to take out and reduce and yet with books the complete opposite is true.

Roger Eschbacher said...

Yeah, even though I tend to err on the side of brevity, that's definitely how it works for me.

On a semi-related note: Some of these folks that do NaNo are amazing in the high word counts they're able to generate in a single month. I saw one on a forum today that had over 600k! That's roughly equivalent to six full novels. I have to wonder about the quality of that many words in that short of time, but you have to give massive respect for the sheer quantity.

Sir Mike said...

Congrats on the 50K!

600K??? There must be quite a few characters. I love Stephen King, he's my all-time favorite, but he tends to embellish at too great a length. I'll stop reading and think, "Wow... these last 200 pages were completely unnecessary!"

I always believe it takes as many pages as it takes to write the story.

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