Writing NaNoWriMo was exhausting this year. Based upon the fact that I felt pretty exhausted by it last year, I'm guessing that's one of the features of the experience. I don't regret it, especially as it gave me a chance to write a story for my wife (I don't usually get writing requests, after all). The training I'd been putting into spending thirty to forty minutes in my blog every day helped make me advance my writing output, so NaNoWriMo didn't end up being a massive change for me.
Indeed, participating in the challenge taught me some things about writing. First of all, my recently adapted style of outlining on note cards and then transferring that effort into the book itself is a luxury I shouldn't avoid in the future. Last year, I wrote a reimagining of Dante's Inferno as a sci-fi story. I used the note cards as a pacing guide--in fact, I plotted out much of both potential sequels on the cards--and as an indication of what I would be doing every day. This year, I conceived of the story, the world, and the basic idea about a week before the challenge began.
That was a mistake.
Sure, I had a thumbnail outline to work off of, and I had formulated the ideas of the story during that week, but the pacing of the story was ill-conceived. Because I didn't have a strong sense of what would happen when, foreshadowing was almost impossible, and characters and ideas that I thought would be important later on disappeared into the miasma of the rough draft. More than once I figured I didn't have time (or energy) to look up a detail, so I left it "for the rewrite"* and moved on. This was so bad that, after writing one chapter in which the characters discussed how many people they had killed, I realized that they hadn't done that many deaths. So they had a conversation in a later chapter, correcting their inconsistencies. That's not good writing, friends.
There's another level of performance to this, however: I put the entire experience up, day by day, on my website. This meant that everyone who was curious (my wife, my mother, and one chap in England tweeted to say he was going to read--I don't know if he kept at it) could see the story flying around. It's a quick story--only 53k words, as you'd expect from a NaNoWriMo experiment--but it's all over the place. Some of my favorite ideas were dropped because of forgetfulness, others were brought in at my wife's request. So, on the whole it's a strange compilation of weirdness.
That being said, it was kind of neat to be able to course correct a little from having such immediate feedback. Since I posted a new chapter basically every day, Gayle was able to remind me of things about the characters that I hadn't remembered, thus helping the continuity a little.
I should say that the reason I wrote a steampunk story about a married couple of cloudfarmers (those who farm (basically) magical vapor out of the clouds) was because we have some steampunk costumes and Gayle wanted a story behind them--so that we would be characters from my book, rather than just "steampunk people". This was a help and a hindrance: the help came from the fact that it gave me a greater investment in the story, knowing that it was not just for me and that there was a tangible piece of the novel in my life; the hindrance came in worrying--more than I ever have--about writing a Marty Sue.
In those delusional moments of pretending that I can make a living off of my writing, I've wondered if people would ever dress up as characters from my stories. Since they tend not to get a lot of physical description (except in ways that are trite or amateurish...and, no, I won't give examples), that seems remote. Well, there are lots of reasons why the idea of someone cosplaying a Dowdle character are remote, but that's certainly one of them. Anyway, while that's always been the truth before, it wasn't this time.
I took liberties with our costumes--in fact, my characters wear a couple of different outfits each as the adventure unfolds. I tried to be emblematic of what Gayle had created with the steampunk costumes, then shift things as necessary to accommodate the story. That was strange for me--usually the most I get in terms of reference material is a vague Image search in Google for "guy in purple pants" or something else weird like that. Having a real-life parallel was a little disorienting. I struggled to know if I had put enough detail in, and felt self-conscious about what I was saying.
This spilled into my crafting of the story. One of the pitfalls of the Marty Sue (or the feminine version, Mary Sue) is when the writer makes the character himself, but perfect. To temper that, I tried to make the couple (again, based upon me and my wife) bicker, argue, save one another, be worried and irritated at the same time--in short, to make them feel real. But, at the same time, I fear that I may have gone too far, making the characters less enjoyable or too acerbic to be around for a long time (even if it is only for 53k words). I hope I didn't overcompensate for the very painful Marty Sue trope I was trying to avoid.
More than anything, though, I learned that I probably ought to be more cautious about putting my story up on my website. I don't know what I was thinking, really, in posting a completely unedited rough draft of my work. There's a reason that rough drafts don't normally get published--they tend to be rubbish. I don't know if this is rubbish, but I do know that I'm probably slightly mental for thinking this was a good idea.
Then again, these essays are always rough drafts, and they haven't sunk my career** as a writer.
Yet.
---
* Yeah, I'm not likely to edit this thing.
** I don't actually have a career as a writer.
Indeed, participating in the challenge taught me some things about writing. First of all, my recently adapted style of outlining on note cards and then transferring that effort into the book itself is a luxury I shouldn't avoid in the future. Last year, I wrote a reimagining of Dante's Inferno as a sci-fi story. I used the note cards as a pacing guide--in fact, I plotted out much of both potential sequels on the cards--and as an indication of what I would be doing every day. This year, I conceived of the story, the world, and the basic idea about a week before the challenge began.
That was a mistake.
Sure, I had a thumbnail outline to work off of, and I had formulated the ideas of the story during that week, but the pacing of the story was ill-conceived. Because I didn't have a strong sense of what would happen when, foreshadowing was almost impossible, and characters and ideas that I thought would be important later on disappeared into the miasma of the rough draft. More than once I figured I didn't have time (or energy) to look up a detail, so I left it "for the rewrite"* and moved on. This was so bad that, after writing one chapter in which the characters discussed how many people they had killed, I realized that they hadn't done that many deaths. So they had a conversation in a later chapter, correcting their inconsistencies. That's not good writing, friends.
There's another level of performance to this, however: I put the entire experience up, day by day, on my website. This meant that everyone who was curious (my wife, my mother, and one chap in England tweeted to say he was going to read--I don't know if he kept at it) could see the story flying around. It's a quick story--only 53k words, as you'd expect from a NaNoWriMo experiment--but it's all over the place. Some of my favorite ideas were dropped because of forgetfulness, others were brought in at my wife's request. So, on the whole it's a strange compilation of weirdness.
That being said, it was kind of neat to be able to course correct a little from having such immediate feedback. Since I posted a new chapter basically every day, Gayle was able to remind me of things about the characters that I hadn't remembered, thus helping the continuity a little.
I should say that the reason I wrote a steampunk story about a married couple of cloudfarmers (those who farm (basically) magical vapor out of the clouds) was because we have some steampunk costumes and Gayle wanted a story behind them--so that we would be characters from my book, rather than just "steampunk people". This was a help and a hindrance: the help came from the fact that it gave me a greater investment in the story, knowing that it was not just for me and that there was a tangible piece of the novel in my life; the hindrance came in worrying--more than I ever have--about writing a Marty Sue.
In those delusional moments of pretending that I can make a living off of my writing, I've wondered if people would ever dress up as characters from my stories. Since they tend not to get a lot of physical description (except in ways that are trite or amateurish...and, no, I won't give examples), that seems remote. Well, there are lots of reasons why the idea of someone cosplaying a Dowdle character are remote, but that's certainly one of them. Anyway, while that's always been the truth before, it wasn't this time.
I took liberties with our costumes--in fact, my characters wear a couple of different outfits each as the adventure unfolds. I tried to be emblematic of what Gayle had created with the steampunk costumes, then shift things as necessary to accommodate the story. That was strange for me--usually the most I get in terms of reference material is a vague Image search in Google for "guy in purple pants" or something else weird like that. Having a real-life parallel was a little disorienting. I struggled to know if I had put enough detail in, and felt self-conscious about what I was saying.
This spilled into my crafting of the story. One of the pitfalls of the Marty Sue (or the feminine version, Mary Sue) is when the writer makes the character himself, but perfect. To temper that, I tried to make the couple (again, based upon me and my wife) bicker, argue, save one another, be worried and irritated at the same time--in short, to make them feel real. But, at the same time, I fear that I may have gone too far, making the characters less enjoyable or too acerbic to be around for a long time (even if it is only for 53k words). I hope I didn't overcompensate for the very painful Marty Sue trope I was trying to avoid.
More than anything, though, I learned that I probably ought to be more cautious about putting my story up on my website. I don't know what I was thinking, really, in posting a completely unedited rough draft of my work. There's a reason that rough drafts don't normally get published--they tend to be rubbish. I don't know if this is rubbish, but I do know that I'm probably slightly mental for thinking this was a good idea.
Then again, these essays are always rough drafts, and they haven't sunk my career** as a writer.
Yet.
---
* Yeah, I'm not likely to edit this thing.
** I don't actually have a career as a writer.
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