Day 13 in the big brother house…
Sorry, wrong unreality show. Briefly, here’s an update and my learnings –
This afternoon on a balmy thunderstuck Friday afternoon in Northern Sydney I unofficially passed NaNoWriMo’s 50K target – by 1233 words according to my independent yet undependable wordcount within Scrivener.
I expect I’ll get nothing done again this weekend, so this may or may not be my final balance in the scheme of things. NaNo doesn’t allow us to officially win until the 20th, so with seven days to go, who knows?
Of the 50K I have done, most has been storyworld building and will never actually see the light of day inside my novel. The total does include one large new scene in my WIP, and a very small short story or piece of flash set within the same work.
Naturally, the actual novel or fiction writing was the toughest of the days. I wouldn’t be admitting anything surprising to suggest I am completely addicted to world-building and surely there’s some medication for the disease?
But my storyworld work has brought many positive surprises – I’ve written some dynamics to resolve issues I didn’t know existed, and it will make for a much more connected story ultimately. I can now perfectly understand the tale behind JK Rowling spending 5 years in the planning stages before ever writing that first HP.
I have plans for more scenes and more storyworld work in the following half of NaNo, but now that I’m out of the stress zone of wanting to “win” I’ll take it a little easier, and make plans for the actual drafting come December.
About Scrivener: I’m not using it for the storyworld work – my story bible is going into OneNote – I like the multiple levels of structure and organisational aspects of the app, and it’s got good cross-platform compatibility now. Putting so much visual and textual elements into Scrivener would have just slowed it down too immensely, even in a separate project from the draft. Those hourglass minutes of auto-backups just kill it.
I never saw myself admitting it, but I actually like OneNote a whole lot now. That’s one (I’m only willing to give one) to Microsoft development.
