Saturday, 30 August 2008
Novel Complete!
I did it!!! I set out to write an entire novel during the summer, and I did just that! MM3 is 22 chapters long, with a total of 75,788 words. I actually finished on Tuesday (26th) but haven't had a chance to write this blog post as I had family visiting this week.
Now... am I brave enough to ask for volunteers to read it? Hmmm... Not sure about that just yet. Let's discuss other matters for the moment.
There were some new exercises I tried in writing this novel, that I feel really helped the process. If you've ever thought about writing a novel, and especially doing so in a short space of time (anyone doing NaNoWriMo this year?), then you might like to try the following ideas to help you.
I kept a word count tally, which informed me how many words I wrote every day, and how many words are in each chapter. This was really useful at times when I struggled to write because it helped me to see the word count rise little by little, which encouraged me to keep writing. It was also inspiring to see that some days I had written 5-6,000 words, and I would try to repeat those successes. I think the chapter word counts will be quite useful when I begin to edit the novel, too.
Every day that I wrote part of my novel (and some days when I didn't), I wrote an entry in a diary that I kept using a simple text editor. I wanted to remember how the whole experience went and what I did when, for future reference, perhaps when writing other novels. This also turned out to be a really good resource, both for remembering what I had to write in each chapter, and for whenever I came close to suffering writer's block. It was somewhere I could vent frustrations and celebrate successes, as well as allowing me to note down ideas for future chapters and plot development.
Before I started writing the novel I came up with character profiles, containing such details as name, age, job, family, appearance, etc. This time, however, I also trawled the Internet to find photos of people who looked how I wanted each character to look. I then added these to each profile, so that I could make every small description in the novel that bit more realistic, because I could see the person in front of me on my computer screen. This also helped the character to come alive and behave in a more realistic manner, I think.
Whenever I wrote part of the novel, no matter how few words, I always made sure I also had open, next to the novel itself, the word count, diary and character profiles document, for ease of use. This worked really well for me, and I think this was novel-writing experience was also possibly the one with the least writing frustrations and slow-going days. In fact, I averaged 3,445 words a day (not including days I didn't have time to write because of outside factors, such as work). Pretty good, methinx!
Anyhoo, that's enough patting myself on the back for today. Time for dinner now, so bye-di-bye!
