hamala.se

[tomas]

Well, I did not make the 50000 word goal this year (either.) But what I did do was that despite being very busy (I wrote nothing or very little for around half the month), despite finishing the novel on the 22nd with just about 25000 words, I still managed to reach 41,679 words!

I feel that, given the conditions and that I said I would be happy with 25000 words, this was a kind of victory, even if I still can not call myself a NaNoWriMo winner. I managed to get there by rewriting scenes to be wordier, adding chapters, prologue and epilogues. It was hard work, but now I have something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, which basically is all that is needed to finish a story. Also, this story is over 100 pages, which is longer than anything I have finished before (although this one still needs a lot of editing.)

One interesting things is that not all those extra 15000 words that were added were just word count. They were mostly added for that purpose, but since they were added in the context of the story, many of those turned out to be good new chapters or scenes, ideas that I never might have explored if I would have just stopped when I reached "the end."

I guess that just goes to show, that there is a real value in just writing, just getting those words down on paper, even if it does not seem to be necessary for the story. Write it first, then edit and possibly cut out parts. As someone said, a bad piece of text can be edited into a great one, but if you have no text you can't edit it into anything.

I don't know if this story will be finished (either), but I do feel it is a good story, and it does deserve to be edited and not just left as it is. It was a story that did surprise me in a way, because even if I had figured out the basic plot before, the feeling of the story did not come out the way I thought (but I'm not sure what I thought it would be). That is not necessarily a bad thing, I do know one thing, and it is that I've had fun writing this time too.

Next year, I'll win this thing.

As is my NaNoWriMo tradition, here's a little graph:


Even more fun stats can be found on nanolyser.