NaNoWriMo 2020
By the skin of my teeth, I finished another NaNoWriMo—and honestly, I didn’t think I’d make it.
NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It runs every year in November with a goal of drafting 50,000 words of a novel. I’ve officially done this twice before (first time here and second time here) and un-officially a few more times. Forging ahead on a first draft over a short time frame typically works well for me as I can keep all the details of the story in my head that way.
Writing is always hard, but this time, it felt really, really hard.
The book I drafted is the middle book of a trilogy (book 1 was drafted last spring and still has a long way to go before it’s ready). This series is significantly more epic than the Setter Chronicles series. There are more settings, more story lines and more point of view characters placing it well into the space opera genre. The overall arch of the trilogy excites me, but there are so many details to sort out.
Back in October, when I was working on the outline (writing goes better for me when I work from a plan), I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory ending. November came and I started drafting. Two thirds of the way through the month, I wrote past the end of my outline and still had no idea how the book should end. It felt like I’d hit a brick wall. I came really close to throwing in the towel, but I kept writing.
The reason I mange to write at all is because years ago I gave myself permission to write really bad first drafts (in fact they are often unreadable). Everything can be fixed later and fun, quirky ideas can be incorporated. For me, writing is iterative—my word count inches higher with each draft.
In the last few days of November, a satisfactory ending popped into my head complete with dirigibles, near-death experiences and flaming starships. Now I just have a hell of a lot of editing to do and I’ll be ready to share.