NaNoWriMo Update: Lessons Learned
The NaNoWriMo experience was eye-opening for me. I took a lot away from this. The first thing I learned about writing is that it takes a long time to write a thousand words. Some days, I would spend the morning commute thinking about what I wanted to include in a particular chapter. I might act out particular scenes in my head. Planning is hard, and that’s before any writing is even done.
On the commute home from work, I would then try my best to dictate at least one chapter into my iPhone. Sometimes I would falter on the words, sometimes I would just ramble through and hope to clean up the verbage later. It worked out fairly well for the most part, but I didn’t realize how little was actually coming out. The notes program on the iPhone does not include a word count.
I got the majority of the way through my story before I tried to actually gauge my progress. I decided to transfer the text into a different program, one with a word counter. I tried Google Docs, but that had its own problems. At least Google’s text editor had a word counter, which is how I found out that my output was only about half of what I thought it was.
So it was halfway through the month before I found out that I would never reach the goal. The story was pretty well fleshed out, most of it was written down in some form, but now I knew that it wouldn’t be enough. I had planned about fifteen chapters, but the more I got into the ending, the more it grew. In all, I had drafted twenty chapters, but had only cleaned up eight of them.
At that point, I had about a week before the finish date. I still wanted to go back and clean up the logic and small plot holes from the earlier chapters, but knowing that I had only written about twenty thousand words did not exactly motivate me to finish the project. As it stands now, the chapters are still sitting in Google Docs, waiting for me to find the time (and the will) to finish them.
As it stands, there’s a decent, if perhaps limited in scope, science fiction book out there waiting to be completed. The current copy reads pretty well until chapter nine, which is where the text is garbled because the voice recognition didn’t quite catch what I said. While editing each chapter, I fix the misspellings and grammar issues, but I’ve got twelve chapters to go. I’ve also got a few ideas to expand the plot and improve the characters. Maybe I’ll finish next year…
Similar Posts:
- Ever Hear Of NaNoWriMo? (0)
- Is Google+ Better Than Facebook? (2)
- Revenge Of The April Fool’s Day Hoax (0)
Recent Comments