Halfway Through NaNoWriMo
November 15th and we're half way through National Novel Writing Month!
Here's a quick breakdown on my stats:
- 27,574/50,000 words written
- 1,838 average words per day
- 1,402 words per day to finish on time
I think that's pretty damned good, especially since this is the first time I'm actually doing NaNoWriMo!
I've been keeping my Twitter account up to date with my word counts (despite feeling extremely spammy about it) and I've had some great writing sessions with my critique group partners. I even had my dad in town for a week, during which my car broke down and I got zero writing done for three days! I've gotta say, I'm pretty proud of my progress.
But we all know, NaNo is all about quantity over quality, so let me shift a little and talk about what I'm writing.
It's been tough. There are days where a scene has just come together and it poured out of me through my fingertips, but there have been other days where I've just felt like I was slogging through the scene I was writing. I keep telling myself that I will fix it in the editing phase, but it's tough to see the end when you're in the middle of a chapter that just seems to fall flat. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
After the first few times that happened, I started to plan out my scenes with even more detail. I watched "How to Build a Scene | Writing" by YouTuber Rachel Stephan (link here) and that actually helped me out some. I'm not exactly following her suggestions, but it gave me a better framework for how to think about the scene and I built off of it. Setting the scene, choosing the protag, and figuring out the conflict was pretty good, but I also started to build little bullet points of specific items I wanted to hit within the scene. If I found myself meandering while writing, I'd go back to those bullet points and wrangle my writing back on track.
It hasn't been a complete fix, but it certainly has helped. I was able to get through a tough scene today and plan the next one which will, hopefully, be a breeze to get through. Lots more action, less emotion and dialogue. I also seem to have more trouble in scenes where I'm in my MC's POV as opposed to others, but that's a whole other story/problem for another blog.
How have you all been doing with NaNo? Are you hitting your word count goals? Are you ahead or behind? How's your WIP progressing? I want to hear!