First Novel, First Revision

After attending a holiday party last weekend and having a lively conversation with a local bookseller, I decided it was time to get back to my 2011 NaNoWriMo novel and start revisions. I am sailing into new waters here. I have never revised a novel before because I have never completed a novel before. I'm excited about the prospect and not feeling an ounce of trepidation.

I spent a few hours last Sunday afternoon taking the first draft and migrating it into my copy of Scrivener.  I can see the benefit of getting a holistic view of the work, having research and thoughts in one place, and being able to jump around easily to work on different sections. I got Scrivener after starting NaNoWriMo last year so I was too unfamiliar with it to use it during November. I am now more familiar with it and I think Scrivener will be a lot of assistance to me in the days to come. I especially like the idea of cutting things but not really getting rid of them in case I change my mind later. Woman's prerogative and all.

I haven't read the first draft since I wrote it a year ago. After finishing it, I told myself I wanted to let some time pass so I could come back to it with fresh eyes. I'm glad I did. As I started piecing the novel into sections for the Scrivener software, I found many delights and surprises in things I had done and forgotten.

I learned something about myself from it too. Despite the fact that I'm an optimist with a good outlook on life, the parts of the novel that have stuck in my mind for a year are pretty much the sections I thought so terrible in the writing of it that I've never let anyone read the first draft. Perhaps I'll explore that someday. For the record, those sections didn't get any better for sitting there a year. They are still awful and will be re-written. I'll also be making changes to some other parts that weren't bad but could be stronger. I've had some relevant live-changing experiences in the past year and my key learnings will probably find their way into my revisions too.

I still have to finish moving the novel into the various chunks I've divided up in Scrivener but that is helping me to see where the weak parts are. So far, revising is a lot of fun. I think I'll do it several times.  :wink:

NaNoWriMo - What's Next?

I apologize for not posting something sooner to let you know that I was a National Novel Writing Month winner (anyone who completes the 50,000 words and has their word count validated on the site is a winner).  It was my first time attempting and succeeding at writing the complete first draft of a novel.  Despite the fact that I heard about NaNoWriMo late, had never written anything that long in my life, and was sick the first week, I jumped in and decided to give it a try.  I am so happy that I did.  I finished it with slightly over 50,000 words, which made me a "winner" among many thousands of winners.  The fact that there are so many of us magnifies the accomplishment for me.  I feel a sense of unity with the other winners, the joy of a shared experience that turned out well.

I am fairly certain that I will never write the same way again; that is, the way I wrote before NaNoWriMo.  That inner editor is still chomping at the bit to get out of the gate, but I'll keep her at bay in the future until after the first draft.  So what's the next step for me?  I'm currently taking the advice of some published writers and haven't yet re-read my first draft.  I will give it about three weeks and then start to work on editing.  I am sure that I will cut a lot of material and add a lot more.  The basic story is done, but there is still so much more to do with what is there.  I'm excited and can hardly wait.

And if you're a writer, I hope you'll join me in writing a new novel in 2012 because I'll be doing it again come November.

NaNoWriMo Madness Continues

I made a lot of progress and then the past couple of nights had some other things to take care of in the evening.  I am over 10,000 words which I find amazing every time I see the word count on the page.  The madcap idea of trying to write 50,000 words in one month is obviously working for me.  I have throttled the inner editor completely (well, almost completely) and I am just writing.

I am taking to heart the advice that Neil Gaiman gave in a NaNoWriMo pep talk, "You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days.  Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.  Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny.  But that does not matter.  What matters right now are the words, one after another.  Find the next word.  Write it down.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat."

The novel that I am writing was a collision of ideas that fell into my lap.  I've been writing fantasy recently and decided to try something completely different for NaNoWriMo since one of the rules is that you have to start the novel in November and finish 50,000 words in the same November.  On a whim I decided to try literary fiction.  I didn't know that most literary fiction tends to be quite a bit longer than 50,000 words until I learned that the average word count of the world's "great novels" is about 135,000 words.  Good thing I didn't read that until after I was committed to my idea!

Ignorance is bliss, though.  I decided to try a literary fiction novel about a woman who is my age and feels vaguely suicidal.  She wants to escape from her life. I thought that I should be able to muse and ponder and toss about 50,000 words around that.  Literary fiction is, after all, more about the character than about the plot, right?

Funny how it happens, though, I started wondering why she'd vaguely feel these things.  It turned out that she was being surplussed at her job and wondered how she'd support herself and her young daughter.  It isn't easy to find a job when you're fifty, as plenty of currently unemployed people can attest.    And then out of the blue, she learns a secret about her recently-deceased mother that changes her life.   She thought her mother was an orphan but she wasn't.  Her mother has a sister and grew up in Hermann, Missouri.

As if that weren't enough, a few days after starting the novel, more plot fell into my lap.  I went to Missouri wine country and started reading about my own ancestor's contributions to early Missouri wine-making.  I've always been a genealogy buff and knew a bit about my third great-grandfather.  I read about a varietal that he'd cultivated that I've never heard of, mostly because I don't think it exists any more (dang prohibition!)

More to come later, but now, back to the novel, which has the working title of The German Diary.