I finished up with 11,687 words at 11:56pm. Whew! It was definitely a sprinting kind of day. I didn’t get started writing until after 1:00pm. I still had over 1,500 words to write at 10:30. I considered giving up after I reached 11,000, but I really don’t want to get behind, because I’m afraid I’ll give up.
I think it’s interesting how I fall back on romance when I’m out of ideas. Nothing like the bloom of love to take up a gazillion words, haha.
I broke the 10k mark a few minutes ago. I was in the middle of a flow and so I barely noticed it go by. Up until then the writing was like pulling teeth out of my own brain. It’s especially hard when the family is watching a movie in the motel room I’m staying in. So distracting!
I wrote the second time jump of the story. Right now it goes future-past-future-past. The future sections are much shorter than the past ones. I think they will jump all over different years, since there are about 10-20 years that are a part of ‘the future’. The ‘past’ is pretty much set in no longer than a 5 year span.
The future is written in present third person tense, except for a few paragraphs when I forgot and started using past. The past is always written in past tense.
Present tense is probably my favorite one to write in. It keeps me focused on where the character is in time and space, and really helps with describing places and thoughts and feelings. Someday I want to write something entirely in that tense, because it is fantastic.
We’ll just say I found this link during completely relevant research. Yes, I wasn’t procrastinating at all.
There is an article here that talks about how to make each character speak differently. Not think differently, speak. This was very interesting to me because it was something I noticed after starting to re-read my last nano novel. I get the feeling that my characters all do sound alike (they all talk like me).
Now that I’m not feeling so rushed, I have time to think about something other than “oh god, gotta get the word count!” The characters have always been the most important part of the story for me, because they are the ones who will carry the plot. We’ll see if can use some of these tips to give my characters their own unique voices.
This is an example of something I find hilarious in my head. I don’t know how well it translates.
He knew every building and every car parked along the street. Except for that Mercedes parked along the curb just outside of his building. The sleek black car clashed painfully with the rusted out white Cadillac and Honda civic that flanked it. As he came nearer, he saw the figure of a woman slumped back against the driver’s seat. A quick glance up and down the street showed no movement. His footsteps quickened and he burst into a jog, sliding between the cars until he was looking in through the side window. Pulling the sleeve of his shirt over his hand, he tested the door. Locked. Locked?
At once the body behind the wheel jerked up as though attached to the hands of the cruelest kind of puppeteer, and began to scream.
“Jesus Christ!” Dunn jumped back from the car. His eyes quickly narrowed as he looked closer and recognized the driver. “Michelle?” The dark-haired woman’s hands had come up in front of her face, a tiny can of Mace poised to strike. Her mouth opened, the dark red lips forming a small ‘o’ of surprise. His sister rolled down her window and glared up at him.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack, Oliver! What were you thinking?”
“I gave you–? What was I–?” He managed to stop himself and took a deep breath before he went off the rails completely.
Today was a hard writing day. The words came in fits and gasps, completely ineloquent. There was a lot of narration, very little description. Also a heavy dialogue day, which is the most fun for me to write, because it feels as though personalities can really be felt out through interactions with other people. After putting in the dialogue, I went back in and added some description and gestures.
I have not been motivated to get ahead. I reached the word goal for today earlier in the afternoon, and then started to procrastinate. This last character is harder in some ways than the others. He isn’t a nice person, and I feel like my normal writing style completely clashes with his personality. I don’t even know if that makes sense, or if I’m just over-thinking things, as usual.
This month has been strange so far in that I haven’t had to scramble for the word count in the same way that I remember doing two years ago. It helps that I have several breaks during the day that are perfect for sitting down and typing 300-400 words at a time.
As of this moment I’m sitting on 6,805 words. I’ll shoot for at least 7k before the night is over, although I’d like to maybe get to 7,300 so I only have to do 1k tomorrow. I don’t know if that’ll happen. I’m feeling laaazy.
Taking a break from writing to…well, write some more, I guess. Today was a slow writing day. I have finished the 5,000 words needed for today, although I hope to add on a few hundred more or so before the day is over. The rest of the week will be a good writing time since I only have two classes each day and I get out fairly early. Mondays and Tuesdays are always the worst, but I made it!
What I mean when I say it was a slow writing day was that I slowed my writing down. It’s partly a defense mechanism, trying to avoid writing about this plot that is not even half-baked yet, but it’s mostly because I realized as I was writing that I have very little description, either of scenery or characters, in places where it really should be. So I’m introducing the characters, although hopefully not in a completely lame way. I just placed them in a location where they would likely go in the morning and just have them look around and notice things and just generally go about their day. Admittedly, it’s not the most riveting thing in the world, but it has actually helped me to develop my characters’ personalities.
I know that sounds like a completely elementary concept, but I’ve always believed that the personality of a character should be brought out in their actions, and not discussed. That has the unfortunate side effect of a completely cardboard personality until that happens. I’m trying to feel them out earlier in the story this time, so I can hopefully delve further into their psyches than I have ever gone before.
There are about three main characters who are the focus of the story as it stands right now. I’ve just finished following the first one around, and have moved on to the second. In my mind, it feels as though the story is dragging, but I know that it will read much quicker than it writes. It is also better to have to take stuff out than add stuff in. There is my wisdom for the night. This is 367 words that I should have been adding to my story.
One thing you should never ever do while doing nano is read the blogs of other people who are doing it. Granted, there are many people who are doing worse than you, but then you see something crazy like someone who had over 6,000 words on the first day. Insanity!
The funny thing is that I get a lot of my word count in when I go back over what I’ve written and fill in the details, which seems to break the editing rule. However, I have realized that I tend to summarize and move on, forgetting that the scene has a location and several characters that may need description. Imagine that.
I can honestly say I have no idea where this novel is going, but it has worked out just fine for me in the past, so I’ll just go with it and see where it leads. Now enough with the non-nano word count. Back to work!
I made pretty good headway today, although I was almost stopped in my tracks when trying to come up with names and more plot. I still don’t know if there is a whole novel in my plot idea.
It’s definitely going to be a story that jumps forward and backward in time. I have also come up with a title.
The Condition of the Shadow
Taken from my sister’s Egyptian homework. It sounded cool. Well, I hope I can keep my momentum through Day 2!
It smells of oil and sweat and old candy bars, but to her it is a comfort, a sign of life. It is proof that their muscles move, and their stomachs ache with hunger. The memory of her last hot bath is quickly fading from her memory, replaced by the long weeks in between the cold, furtive washings in standing water of questionable quality, with one person always on lookout for the dead things that seem to congregate around bodies of water, as though they know the living need it.
How did we get here? Max is fully awake now, and turns his head towards her. His blue eyes are bright, set deeply into a face older than his twenty-odd years would suggest. He could not have been more than a couple years old when everything ended. What goes through the mind of a child that young? Perhaps his parents were some of the lucky ones who lived in a more isolated place, the north woods or New Mexico. He would have grown up under the cover of forests or deserts, keeping one step ahead of the grey storm front that covered the world. The news read like a weather report until the radio waves went silent.
“What is it?” he asks when he sees that she is wide-awake.
Emily sits up in the bed, her skin oily, the sheets stiff and grimy, and listens. There is a faint scratching at the edge of her hearing, and she sees the cockroach disappear into a crack in the drywall at the base of the wall. She imagines the spaces between the walls crawling with insects in a roiling crackling mass. A part of the cocoon. A ray of sunshine hits the faded white door, fragile and thin on its hinges. Any number of things could be beyond the four walls. Her breath is coming shallow and fast as she imagines the metal handle turning. Scratching insects fill her hears in a crescendo of strings.
“Can you hear it?” she whispers.
There is a slow singsong scrape as Max slides the aluminum bat off the nightstand. The metal surface is stained with flaking brown blood, and indentations mar the smooth curved surface. He never played baseball, it’s one of the few facts she knows about his life, something he let slip as she handed him the weapon for the first time. Usually they don’t talk about the past. It’s easier to pretend the world was always like this, a setting to a terrible horror movie. Just as it is easier to forget that they once traveled with more than just two.
Sometimes she hears the soundtrack to her own life, the drawn-out whine of the violins and the deep echo of the tympani. The rise to forte that will signal the beginning of the end. Her hand fumbles beneath the pillow for the small hand ax. Her heart hesitates until the familiar feel of the metal handle resting in the palm of her hand. She sees the double barrels of a shotgun resting against the wall just where she left it. She slings it across her shoulder and that’s when she hears it; above the noise of insects there is a different kind of sound. A collection of sounds, really, the thump of a heel on carpet, the rustle of clothing against what could be skin or bone, and the soft sound of a body leaning heavily against the wall. Then another, and another. The door, rotten to the core, begins to bow under the weight of bodies, the groan of wood echoed by the patient grunting of those trying to overcome it.
How did they get here? Emily and Max straighten their shoulders at the same time. They do not look at each other; each has eyes only for the sagging door. Of all the questions that haunt her mind, this is the only one to which she holds the answer. She can count back the hours, the days, and the years that led to the course of events that destroyed the future. She lives with it now, and some days it overwhelms her so that tears spill down the hard lines of her face. Max thinks she cries for what she has lost, but she cries for what she has stolen from everyone.
How did I get here? The question lingers as she stares up at the ceiling, the deep cracks forming a web down the walls, enveloping her in this cocoon just as deadly as if the spider had returned. A deathtrap. The cracks cover a greater instability than just the steel beams of a building. This is only the hurricane that came from the butterfly’s wings. The sheets are twisted around her legs and arms again as the nightmares make her slide sideways, from one hell to another. She feels safer in the dream; at least there she has a measure of control. In this waking nightmare, she can see movement that could be her bedfellow or the bugs that infest the rooms. Perhaps it is best not to know, but she slowly turns her head to the side.
The only light comes from the first rays of light signaling dawn. A cockroach slips over the end of the bed. Many years ago it would have made her scream, but now she closes her eyes and lets the light beat against the lids. She feels every ache in her muscles as the day brings awareness. Forty never used to feel this old, she is sure of it. Then again, rooms in motels used to have televisions that worked and bed sheets that were laundered. The locks on the doors protected you.
There is a stirring beside her as her companion awakens. She can hear him groan softly, the bed shifts as he raises an arm to his head. He does this each time and she can’t help but wonder why he sounds so surprised. It is as though he is expecting something different to greet his eyes.
There is a stench in the room, and it is partly from them.
