more nano rambling

[rivendellrose]

Last night, I had one of those dreams that would have made a fabulously good premise for a novel... if only I had half a clue in the universe of what the hell was going on in it. As usual, this led me to lay in bed trying to recapture it, fall back to sleep, and end up skittering in late to work.

It's not the waking up that I have trouble with. It's the getting out of bed. And it's only going to be downhill from here, til about April or so. Cold and lack of light always make getting up that much harder for me.

NaNo Words: 3,518. Still ahead of schedule, if only barely!
NaNo Feelings: Managed to write a whole scene last night, realize that needed to be much later and totally different, then wrote a completely different version of the scene... and realized that, honestly, I must've somehow forgotten what it was I was originally headed for when I started plotting this story. The plot that I have so far? Really doesn't so much match my initial intentions. Drat. So I have a feeling I'm going to be fiddling with all of this quite a bit... I may very well have 50,000 words at the end of the month (thanks to 5 years of college and a whoooooole lot of fanfiction, putting words on the page isn't really the problem anymore), but making them into a cohesive plot that can carry a novel... may take several false starts and hiccups. I'm hoping, at the moment, to come out of this with something that I can spend the next several months piecing together into a real novel. Ah well. Progress of a sort, in any case. Sometimes the only thing to do is write false starts and random bits until I have enough (and know where I'm going well enough) that I can go back and start reassembling the puzzle.

Whoever said that writing fanfiction doesn't teach you anything about writing clearly wasn't doing it right. See above, my exact process on what I consider one of the best fics I ever wrote - take a theme that won't leave you alone and just keep trying the damned thing until finally you can take all the bits and pieces, put the good bits together, and make something cohesive of them. :P

This novel, so far, reminds me of Jane Eyre shoved into the Firefly verse and spiced liberally with A Little Princess. No, you really don't want to know how that happened.

Comments

[shadawyn.livejournal.com]

but making them into a cohesive plot that can carry a novel... may take several false starts and hiccups. I'm hoping, at the moment, to come out of this with something that I can spend the next several months piecing together into a real novel.

Yeah, that is pretty much writing a novel. Sometimes you can cut down the hiccups with some prewriting, but not all of them. Some stories don't want to tell you anything until you try to write them. And sometimes you can spend several months on an outline and planning and have 30 pages of outline, and then fine a plothole the size of a galaxy when you get halfway into writing it... er, not that that's ever happened to me ;)

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

Yup. I'd have preferred to start out with a stronger concept of what the heck I'm doing, but on the whole, this kind of writing suits me, I think. Just kind of... go with it, follow my instincts, see where I end up.

It's kind of stressful, in a way, but I have a feeling it might work.

...And dear sweet gods I'm practically falling asleep at my desk I'm so tired and bored. It's 4pm... can I go home yet? *Wibbles*

[fourseat.livejournal.com]

I mean, sometimes stories just write themselves. You don't know where they're headed until they take you there, and all that. I've heard a bunch of writers talking about stories like those. *shrug*

[rivendellrose.livejournal.com]

There are those, yes. Unfortunately, those, for me, are fic. Original stories are the ones where I sit down for hours at the computer saying "so... is it this? No? This, then? No. Okay... is it this?" while the characters and my subconscious and everything around me yawn and twiddle their thumbs and eventually I want to strangle someone. Probably myself.

Oh, NaNoWriMo. I would like you so much better if you didn't make me wish I could write original work. :P

...And poor you, I'm sorry I'm ranting at you. Bad me. *shame*