I'm
participating in NaNoWriMo again, the thirty day
feels-like-a-constant-hangover event where you try and knock out a
50,000 word novel in the month of November, but this year I'm doing it a
bit differently. I spent November 2012 pounding keys and reached the
50,000 word target, leaving me with a book that was very rushed and
needed a ton of work doing to it (gibberish taken out, and descriptions
and grammar put in) but I've found it a real struggle to sit down and
edit. I always prefer writing new things to tidying up my old work
anyway, and with such a mammoth task I just keep putting it off,
overawed at the size of the mountain in front of me. To put it into
context, when I write a 3000 word story I will usually end up reading
through it and editing it about twenty times or more, so multiply that
over the size of a novel and it leaves me wondering how anyone in the
history of the world has ever completed a book before.
I
found NaNoWriMo a really good motivator, mostly because you get a
little graph that shows your progress throughout the month, so I thought
why not use it to help me edit this year. For every hour I spend on my
novel I'm giving myself a thousand words to my total, in the hope that
come the end of November I'll have managed to spend fifty hours on it,
and then I can keep doing the same in the months following. So far,
halfway through the month I'm a bit behind, and have only given myself eighteen hours, but that's a hell of a lot better than last month, when I
would have given myself zero hours, should I have been keeping count.
Even though now I've got into it the task seems even bigger than when I
started, with that little graph helping me tick along editing my novel
doesn't seem quite so daunting. I've managed to get back from hiding my
manuscript in a drawer to spreading it all over my desk and constantly
thinking of how it can be improved.
All
I've done in eighteen hours work is read through the first of six parts
and make a load of changes and notes (admittedly it is the longest part,
so that's probably a third of the whole story). I've then split that
part into eleven chapters and I've edited the first two. I should have a
novel completed some time after I die of very old age.
If you'd like to you can follow my progress here: http://nanowrimo.org/participants/adam_bowman/novels
