hmmmm. madness? again?

[rmd]

november is coming, and it's time to figure out if i want to try doing nanowrimo again. (tally so far is 2 times, with a 50% success rate, which also means a 50% failure rate.) it's been a few years, so maybe it's time to try again.

attempt 1 was lesbians living in the fictional cannon hill section of roxbury (similar in location to fort hill but rearranged for my needs) and freaky horror involving a cult that was responsible for the introduction of centipedes to new england in the late 1800's. attempt 2 involved massive conspiracy, the real reason for the big dig cost overruns (that is, the secret base under boston and the harbor - everyone knows about it, right?) and ended (by which I means "stopped because i hit my word count") with a submarine battle off sable island out in the mid atlantic.

Comments

Oh?

[taura-g.livejournal.com]

I think I would really like to read attempt #2.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

your stories sound brilliant. i say do it :)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Why not? *cheers you on*

[sethg]

I wanna read about the secret base!

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

The Big Dig sounds like a good way to hide a secret base (I always like Gerry Andersen's idea in the 1970s TV show UFO of hiding a secret base underneath a movie studio (who is going to notice strange looking people or vehicles on a movie lot?).

Since you stopped when you hit your word limit the last time, perhaps you could pickup the story again and work until the next word limit?

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

I guess it depends on whether you enjoy the process, and what (if anything) you hope to get out of it. In practice, if you follow the standard path, Nanowrimo doesn't result in a good end product; if you want to write something good, you have to do things a bit differently (meaning that you don't stop writing on November 30 or when you hit your word count).

I think, too, that in its the original conception, the Nanowrimo "method" was never meant to be a writing method, but more of an antidote to the mental masturbation that gets in the way of actual writing. Call it a necessary but not sufficient condition: in order to write a novel, you need to be able to pound out a whole bunch of words, plain and simple. But there's more to a novel than a word count: at a bare minimum, there's this thing called narrative, without which a novel can't exist. At some point you need to develop a grasp of the narrative -- this is the novelist's essential tool, and the primary distinction between a good novel and a bad one is the skill with which this tool is used. Most Nanowrimites are inexperienced and don't even understand that this tool exists...which is okay, if you're a beginner, because the most important thing to do at that point is get some mileage under your belt. But it's also important to understand that at this stage, you're a bare step up from a typing monkey, and you don't want to stay at this stage forever. Nanowrimo does nothing to encourage this process, which doesn't make it a bad thing -- just a very limited and not sufficient thing, if the goal is to produce an actual novel.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think if my goal were "write a good novel", I'd take a different approach. I'd probably also be writing more fiction outside of nanowrimo, which is to say, at all. Instead, it's an occasional gonzo attempt to lay track in front of a moving train in my head.

What I got out of it both times before was getting to that point of figuring out what comes next. I can knock out a short-story-length bit of prose without too much trouble, but getting past that and continuing a thread longer than that is a challenge. So nanowrimo did a good job of pushing me past that. The first time, I got a bit further and then sputtered out. The second time, I managed to generate the full 50K wordcount, although there were a few times where I came to a dead end and opted for the equivalent of "um. um. and then ... SOMETHING RANDOM EXPLODED."

I figure if I do it this time, my goal will be to have a less fractured narrative and if I'm going to have random things explode, at least know *why* it blows up before I write the explosion.