Nanowrimo has ended, and I'm still
writing. Not as much, it's true: 1200 or so words a day, instead of
1700. I am writing fewer words, and for less time, but more
efficiently.
Instead of fifteen minutes, then half an hour of
preparation to do another fifteen minutes – that's what I pretend
I'm doing, “preparing” – I am now sitting down with a timer set
for one hour, with the deal that I only write during that time.
This ability to sit and write, without
looking at social media, getting up to make myself tea, ask my cat
questions about her dining preferences, wonder why I still don't have
a pair of Totoro socks, etc, is completely a product of Nanowrimo's
word sprints. I now know what that mind set is, and can click into it
after November.
It only took me four years of
participation in Nano for me to learn that...
Oh, and the other thing I learned this
time? Type without looking at the computer keyboard or screen to
reduce the pressure (and boredom) of writing a scene that isn't
flowing to me easily. Seriously, this has been a major help.
The lesson from two years ago: I learned about dictation
into my phone's “notes”, speech to text.
Last year's lesson: I tried and failed at using Scrivener to write a first draft. I think I've learned that one long and messy somewhat linear file is just the way
I write, and I'll probably have to accept it. No more happy visions
of an organized novel from the very first words. Sigh.
Nano is different from my normal
writing in another way, as well. Namely, I usually, in non-Nano work, think about what
I'm writing a bit more as I go. Which makes for better writing,
perhaps. It certainly means less of a mess to clean up in the
rewrites.
But since the Nano goal is to fast track your way past a
probably debilitating inner editor, it makes sense to sail right on
by your English teacher internalizations for a month. Which segues into my take on revision -
After having done this for a handful of
years now, I want to disagree with the usual advice offered for slow
cooker novel revisions: the classic recommendation to stick the
completed first draft in the drawer for at least two weeks and forget
about it. It just doesn't work as well here for me.
Having joined the break neck November
lemmings, I have written too fast for me to have sufficiently
communicated to my future self what on Earth I meant half of the
time.
Given the empty fortress that is my
memory bank, I have to go back over the manuscript as soon as I reach the end
in order to nail a few stragglers to the table.
Then it's drawer time.
Okay, it's actually a file on the
computer that sits innocuously inside another file, to be forgotten
about until I gather the nerve to print it on paper.