NaNoWriMo - The Handyman Day 30

Potter survived with a little
mad look in 'is eyes

It is done. November is over. In the last 30 days my hair has grown unreasonably long, as did the hair on my face - at unreasonably strange angles too. Some of the summer lustre has disappeared from my skin - now paler. And I do believe there might be a bag or two more under my eyes. Maybe that's just from the count of my years and not just 30 days in November.

NaNoWriMo has at times felt a little like trying to run on ice. It has been impossibly, dangerously fast (god it feels good writing adverbs and adjectives) and at others, like I was getting nowhere.

Above all I entered the month hoping to learn a little more about the kind of writing process that works for me. As ever these things often end up revealing the obvious. I discovered writing isn't about hitting a daily count or monthly targets. It is about giving yourself time to write every day, even if that time is then spent researching the obscure and arcane. It is about finding some way of progressing the story each day even if it's in building the detail of the world and not the word for word. I learned writing is about being imaginatively fearless, believing in what it takes for you as an individual to write the best story and not worrying about others or hitting those targets. I learned I can write upwards of 2k in a day with a full section of the story plotted in my head. That it sometimes takes me two or three days of no words and lots of pondering to get to that point. It is more efficient for me to take these days of no words rather than writing 6k of words because I need something on the page to hit a target, only to later find the story doesn't need those words. Or worse being blind enough to justify keeping them simply because I wrote them.

It feels like I have tried everything this last year in learning the best method for my writing, with the irony being that I've come full circle to the process I started with while writing Chasing Innocence. I do know that the initial translation of mental imagery to the page is the part I struggle the hardest with.

For the baying millions waiting to hear my final count for NaNoWriMo of November 2013 of the common era - it is 23,433 - the most words I've ever been aware of writing in a single calendar month.

I will be continuing with The Handyman now to completion and will be posting progress through this blog, if only revealing the word count infrequently.

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