NaNoWriMo - Day 3
Well, I've not started on my day's output yet, but after a marathon day on Thursday and a coasting-along-quite-nicely-thank-you Friday I am at 8,217 words. Last year my approach was pretty much to scribble out 1,667 as best I could each day, with the occasional wobble and panicked catch up. This year, I'm basically trying to capture as much slack as I can going along, so I'll have room to maneuvre when the terrain gets trickier later on. My secondary target is to take the 30th off, but to have already finished by then.
The ultimate destination for what I'm writing is helping me a little in forming the structure of the story, and allowing me to not take too seriously the peculiar order in which I'm telling the tale. There is a distant past childhood memory section that I have no intention of starting on till I've got the dreadful part about love and betrayal out of the way. My worry is that I'm assuming the childhood section will stand up to the same level of scrutiny as the stuff I'm writing now and it may well not. Plenty of time to find more story to tell, though.
I've brought in a state-run cult for the "present day" vignettes, the challenge of which is to blur the lines between something we would recognise as a cult and something that is the feasible unintended outcome of a government drive. But that kind of problem solving is what NaNoWriMo is all about. Not it's not; it's about words.
I'm also having some fun taking the metaphorical ideas about jigsaws and coupling them up with the narrative, which helps a great deal in rationalising why the book is about a guy doing a jigsaw puzzle, beyond the structure alone. There are also some straggly bits that I want to include but I'm not quite sure yet what they're for. I worked for a day or two at a commercial espionage company as an audio typist. The job involved transcribing phone conversations between agents posing as clients and various people such as sales staff, or scientists, or whoever. I wasn't told that's what the company did, but it really could have been the only purpose of the recordings I worked on. I desperately want to give this job to George, my main character, and use it to crank up his paranoia a bit. Can't write about it too much here, though, because as we all know, you only get so many words a day to use, and I don't want to put them all in here. It's not true, but it does feel true.
I have uploaded the opening to Pieces to my NaNoWriMo profile. Please note that the first few sentences start with "And". I did this firstly to suggest that events happen prior to the start of the "action", which seems fitting for a story that is memory; secondly I did it to annoy English teachers the length and breadth of the nation (pretty big guys, some of those English teachers).
And on. And on.
The ultimate destination for what I'm writing is helping me a little in forming the structure of the story, and allowing me to not take too seriously the peculiar order in which I'm telling the tale. There is a distant past childhood memory section that I have no intention of starting on till I've got the dreadful part about love and betrayal out of the way. My worry is that I'm assuming the childhood section will stand up to the same level of scrutiny as the stuff I'm writing now and it may well not. Plenty of time to find more story to tell, though.
I've brought in a state-run cult for the "present day" vignettes, the challenge of which is to blur the lines between something we would recognise as a cult and something that is the feasible unintended outcome of a government drive. But that kind of problem solving is what NaNoWriMo is all about. Not it's not; it's about words.
I'm also having some fun taking the metaphorical ideas about jigsaws and coupling them up with the narrative, which helps a great deal in rationalising why the book is about a guy doing a jigsaw puzzle, beyond the structure alone. There are also some straggly bits that I want to include but I'm not quite sure yet what they're for. I worked for a day or two at a commercial espionage company as an audio typist. The job involved transcribing phone conversations between agents posing as clients and various people such as sales staff, or scientists, or whoever. I wasn't told that's what the company did, but it really could have been the only purpose of the recordings I worked on. I desperately want to give this job to George, my main character, and use it to crank up his paranoia a bit. Can't write about it too much here, though, because as we all know, you only get so many words a day to use, and I don't want to put them all in here. It's not true, but it does feel true.
I have uploaded the opening to Pieces to my NaNoWriMo profile. Please note that the first few sentences start with "And". I did this firstly to suggest that events happen prior to the start of the "action", which seems fitting for a story that is memory; secondly I did it to annoy English teachers the length and breadth of the nation (pretty big guys, some of those English teachers).
And on. And on.
posted by Hamilton's Brain | 7:46 am
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home