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| Where the magic happens... |
This year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was my opportunity to break out of my writer's block. If you didn't know, NaNoWriMo is a website that challenges writers to work on their writing and write 50,000 words from the 1st to the 30th of November. I think it is a good way of tricking yourself into finally getting shit done. I currently work full time and it is a massive change from being a student. I don't have strict deadlines anymore, so imposing deadlines on myself is really hard. NaNo was especially helpful in that way as it gave me a goal and a set date to work to. Unfortunately, I didn't succeed in writing the obligatory 50,000 words this November, but I did give it a good crack.
After umm-ing and ahh-ing about what project to work on - to continue the novel I started for my dissertation or start something completely new - I decided to start fresh on something I'd been thinking about writing for a while. I wrote about 1,000 measly words in the first week, mainly in note form as I fleshed out a plot. But, after a while, I found my concentration drifting back to the novel I'd already started and I decided to focus back on that.
For my dissertation in my final year of university, I did a creative writing portfolio and wrote the first 10,000 words of my own original novel. Ever the sucker for dystopian fiction, my novel centres around a young woman, in her 20s, who has been imprisoned and experimented on for over a year. When released, she discovers that she has been moulded into a super soldier to fight mindlessly for a cause she doesn't understand or necessarily believe in. Needless to say, drama ensues, blah blah blah, you can all read it when I publish it! Over the course of the month I managed to write a few thousand for it. It's not an amazing amount! I know that! But I am so pleased with myself for getting back into something I'd neglected for so long.
To be honest, the hardest thing I found was remembering exactly where I'd left off. I've been writing it for over 2 years now. So instead of agonising over what I'd already done, I decided to push forward. I wrote little scenes here and there from random parts in the book, parts I'd been particularly excited about. This is working quite well for me because, instead of having a start and a finish and having to write the inbetweens, which is very overwhelming, I now have lots of pit stops throughout to aim for!
I've never finished a novel I've started and I am so driven with this one. I vaguely remember being told that, when it comes to writing, you should just get everything written down and worry about the edit later. So that's what I've been doing and I've found writing it so much more enjoyable. It is so much more exciting to make progress than stay stuck in the same place.
Anyway, that's all I really have to say at the moment. I didn't complete NaNoWriMo this year, maybe next year! But, if anything, I have reignited my ardent love of writing again, so thanks NaNo!
