Nanowrimo - one year later

This time last year, I had just completed "Echo Hall" and was beginning the long (and ongoing) slog of looking for an agent. I knew I needed to get on with my next novel, so I decided to sign up for Nanowrimo as a way to get going. Having spent ten years writing "Echo Hall" and knowing my average monthly word count was usually around the 2-3,000 mark, I had no expectation that I might actually achieve the target.  But, I reasoned, if I managed 20,000 words, that would be a very good start.

Much to my surprise, I found myself completely focussed on the 1,700 word/day limit, and completed the required 50K with a couple of days to spare. I really enjoyed myself too. Just throwing words on the page without thinking about them, I freewheeled through to complete a piece of work with some semblance of a beginning, middle and end. Inevitably, when I re-read it, I found the majority of those 50,000 words were pretty rubbish with most characters needing further fleshing out. The pacing was completely off and (partly due to the nature of the situation they are in) there were  far too many stultifying scenes of  people sitting by a campfire uttering banalities. I might have won the Nanowrimo prize and written the skeleton of a novel, but clearly, it would need revising.

I deliberately left it alone for a few months, to let my characters start talking to me and explain themselves a bit better. However, the beginning of the year was a difficult time, and it was only in the summer that I felt able to pick it up again. Which initially sent me into a panic. Having decided I had 9 characters who were going to tell this story, I  suddenly saw two other ways I could do it, which would lead to a cast of thousands. I spent a fortnight wondering whether my original idea was strong enough, until I recognised I was procrastinating. I decided to stick to my plan, as my first instincts were good ones, but I soon discovered that the individual arcs were a total mess. Some people had lots happening at the beginning only for their stories to peter out, some had back stories emerging too late only to be resolved in the last few pages. The interconnections between the sections were also muddled and the time line was all over the place. Something had to be done.

So I decided to sort out each individual journey first. There are five parts to the novel, with each character having a chapter/part. I spent a couple of days copying them into another document, to enable me to look at each of them separately. After that, it was time to tackle them one by one. Which has been agonisingly slow so far. Since September, I've been working on the first which and I only completed  last weekend. It seemed to take weeks to edit a couple of pages, as I reworked paragraphs and sentences, over and over again. Then, just as I was coming to the end, I worked out something about the character's past that is pretty crucial to understanding who she is.It makes her much more morally ambiguous, which doesn't quite fit yet with where she ends up, so there's more to do. However, I think I need to look at the other characters now, and save any more changes for the next edit.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons I've been working so slowly, is that I haven't taken time out to plan properly. So this morning, I got plotting...

I still have some gaps, but it was helpful to lay the stories out side by side and start seeing connections between them. I need to add in a time line, particularly taking notice of the tides (the sea is very important in this book). But, I have a draft schematic, which hopefully will get me to the end of this edit...

I'm still not sure on quite a few things. At the moment, all the characters are written in different tenses and persons to distinguish their voices. I have a feeling that's messy and may need addressing. I also have a couple of characters who I absolutely love, but maybe two too many for this book. To cull or not to cull will be a question that will dominate the next few months. And of course, if I do, there'll be some major rewrites to excise them from the text. But it's a start, and one that makes me believe I'm getting somewhere, rather than faffing around in the dark.

Though I absolutely loved doing Nanowrimo last year I won't be joining in next week. I have so much to do on "The Wave", that I can't be  distracted from that goal at the moment. Knowing how long it took me to write "Echo Hall", I won't be making any plans to join Nanowrimo any time soon, but if you're doing it this year I wish you well.

May the words flow freely
May the characters develop before your eyes
May you reach your 50,000 word goal.
And then...let the edits begin.