Deborah Woehr

Sometime around noon today, I surpassed the 50K mark for this year’s National Novel Writer’s Month contest. Even though I had written out a detailed outline the month before, I had reservations about finishing this thing before the end of the month. I’m nowhere near finished with this story yet, but I’m relieved that the contest is over. I had a lot of fun and hope to work this into a sellable book next year.

I’ve reached that dreaded middle range my novel. If you’ve ever had the pleasure/pain of writing novel-length fiction, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s that stage where your story gets more interesting by the paragraph or falls like a dead redwood tree. I’m not sure what condition my story is in right now, and I can’t afford to care right now. Somewhere between Chapters 10 and 12, my characters decided to hijack the original plot and veer out on their own. I’ll know after I’m finished.

As of right now, I’m within 500 words of reaching the 40K mark. It feels great surpassing last year’s word count. My goal for this weekend is to reach 45K or more. Hopefully, I’ll crank out more.

I wasn’t going to post anything until Day 15. But then again, I always seem to break out of the mold I try to set for myself. I started this weekend sick as a dog and didn’t expect to make much progress. I figured I’d be lucky to crank out three thousand words, if I was lucky.

By Friday night, I felt marginally better and decided to see if I could handle staring at the computer screen. My word count was somewhere around 13K. Not bad for the 7th day. I wished that I was further along, but the reality of daily living only allows me so much time in a day. 13K was not a bad number for Day 7. I started clacking away, reaching 14, 15, and then 16 by Saturday night. I looked at the word counts of my NaNo writing buddies. They encouraged me more than they’ll ever know.

Yesterday, I went straight to the computer and started again. My sister called at around 11:15 (my time), and we talked for an hour. It was around 2pm when I hung up the phone with her. I don’t know where the hours went after that. The next thing I knew, I reached 20K and then 21K. When I decided to finish last night, I had reached 22.7K. I wanted to keep going, but I had to go to work.

This morning, I surpassed 23K. My story has stayed within the outline, although the plot points have changed for the better (I think). I already know what I need to fix, but I’m not touching that right now. I’m going to push myself to the halfway mark tonight.

The first thing I did when I got up yesterday morning was turn on the computer. I automatically checked Twitter to see what other NaNo participants had achieved. Many of them are on the East Coast, so they were able to start 3 hours ahead of me. Halloween night, I was so jealous of them because I couldn’t wait to start. I had finished my outline on Thursday and felt kind of lost without a writing project to work on.

At any rate, I turned to the first chapter of my outline and had a moment of indecision. Should I write this novel in first person or third person POV? How should I start the first paragraph? I handled this like I handled my second try at diving off the high dive: I jumped and didn’t worry about it. But then, I found myself condensing the first two chapters into one and began to wonder if I was going to be able to follow this outline precisely as I had written it.

I kept going, finding myself staring into space for long periods of times as the scenes rolled across my mind. Then I would type several paragraphs before I would stop to daydream again.

Last night, shortly before midnight, I passed the 3K word mark. I wanted to continue, but I was fading. This morning, I got up, performed my computer ritual. I’m looking at my outline and thinking that the next scenes for the next chapter are in the right place. I plan to finish the chapter I worked on yesterday, and then tackle the next. Unless I get really excited/frustrated with my progress, I won’t write another post about NaNo until mid-month. I’m hopeful that I’ll reach the 30K mark by then. We’ll see.