nano update
Nov. 20th, 2010 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishWords: 22,300
Expected words: around 33,300
AHAHAHAHA. At the 2/3 mark and not even halfway there. I'm torn between "this is utterly hopeless" and "this is totally doable." Because if I write 3,000 words a day for the next ten days, then I'm there. But I can't do that, because I have to go to work for three of those days, and to Thanksgiving dinner with my family on a fourth. Post-T'giving I'll have four or five days to do nothing but write, and that will help, but I honestly don't know if it will be enough to get me there.
And I don't know if I care, either. I mean, obviously I care about finishing something I said I'd do, and proving that I can do it, and all that. But the writing is crap, enough so that it's making me twitchy about how bad it is. My characters are either flat or contradictory, my worldbuilding is an incoherent mess (even though it's drawing on someone else's world, the reader will see it as an incoherent mess, because I've not given nearly enough pacing and small hints and all that), and the plot is... serviceable, I think, that part I can do pretty well. I suspect that I shall finish this and lock it away in a Drafts folder and never touch it again.
I'm not sure whether Just Write The Damned Thing is doing me any good or not. It might in smaller doses. I /do/ think that a thousand words a day is a sustainable pace now, which is an improvement. I can understand how people can just sit down and knock out a story in a night, when it used to be a struggle for me to get four hundred words at a stretch. So that much has been good.
We shall see.
Expected words: around 33,300
AHAHAHAHA. At the 2/3 mark and not even halfway there. I'm torn between "this is utterly hopeless" and "this is totally doable." Because if I write 3,000 words a day for the next ten days, then I'm there. But I can't do that, because I have to go to work for three of those days, and to Thanksgiving dinner with my family on a fourth. Post-T'giving I'll have four or five days to do nothing but write, and that will help, but I honestly don't know if it will be enough to get me there.
And I don't know if I care, either. I mean, obviously I care about finishing something I said I'd do, and proving that I can do it, and all that. But the writing is crap, enough so that it's making me twitchy about how bad it is. My characters are either flat or contradictory, my worldbuilding is an incoherent mess (even though it's drawing on someone else's world, the reader will see it as an incoherent mess, because I've not given nearly enough pacing and small hints and all that), and the plot is... serviceable, I think, that part I can do pretty well. I suspect that I shall finish this and lock it away in a Drafts folder and never touch it again.
I'm not sure whether Just Write The Damned Thing is doing me any good or not. It might in smaller doses. I /do/ think that a thousand words a day is a sustainable pace now, which is an improvement. I can understand how people can just sit down and knock out a story in a night, when it used to be a struggle for me to get four hundred words at a stretch. So that much has been good.
We shall see.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-21 03:46 pm (UTC)I'm having the same Nano-related issues as you. I manged to hit the halfway mark on time, but then I had (expensive) car trouble and the story just started feel really... shitty. Which everyone says is the point, but still. However. I always think about that stuff I write, and when I look back at it later I realize it's not so shitty after all. You'd probably have a similiar experience - it seems to be fairly endemic among writers.
I really do think the whole point of Nano is to stretch yourself as a writer, and from what I've read here it sounds like you've done that, definitely. So you've already "won" in ways that matter, and everything else is just (as they say) gravy.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-22 05:09 am (UTC)