Overall, I’ve had a tough NaNoWriMo so far. On top of real life making it difficult to find the time for the first third of the month, I’ve been struggling with an outline that really wasn’t anywhere near detailed enough. When I’ve pushed through and forced myself to write anyway – because I’ve kind of had to, if I wanted to complete the challenge – this has exposed a lot of holes in what I had managed to plan. Stuff that I really know better than to do: introducing way too many characters (many of them so half-baked I don’t even really know who they are myself!) and lots of scenes that just don’t have any conflict, and end up being characters talking and talking and talking. It’s bad and it’s felt bad to write.
Over the last three days, things have improved. I reached one of the few sections of my outline that was sufficiently detailed, and it had a clear and pressing conflict with flow-on consequences for future events, and the difference to my morale has been night and day. I feel so much better writing this section, and I’m dreading when I get to the end of it, and have to write another “talking heads” bit…
Really I need to do a radical revamp of the outline, probably starting with working out who all these characters are that I’ve introduced, and what conflicts result from the dynamics between them. It’s so hard to find time to do that during NaNoWriMo, when I already need to find the time to write my 1,667 daily words (today that only took me two hours though, so, progress!). It’s possible that I just have to though, if I don’t want to find myself writing unusable “junk words” instead. Bahhh.
