A friend, questioning my reasons for absence from Six Sentences ("I am impressed that you are still novelling") surprised me because it really is NOT possible to write a novel in a month, and I knew that 'Not wanted on Voyage' would take much longer than that to properly complete.
For three of those five weeks (two were taken up, most enjoyably, with friends and family) I've been editing what was already written and trying to fill in the scamped bits which were necessary to reach 'The End' by November 30th. Harder than writing from scratch in many ways, and the more it grows the harder it gets and the more apparent the holes in it.
With a cast of around thirty-five, a whole shoal of red herrings and three, four, five attempted murders, it's more like plate-juggling. It took two days to write a half-hour episode of confrontation simply because I couldn't keep in my head how many policemen there were supposed to be in the room, and had to keep practising on myself to understand how to describe how someone could be held tight, walked backwards, with a knife held to their throat ...
And the word total has grown only 10K from the 78K I ended on, but there is still more to write as well as more to prune. Not that I'm not enjoying it, just it's mind-consuming, and likely to be so for a few months yet.
Good for you to keep working on it. I stopped, but plan to get back in action shortly!
ReplyDeleteIf you're like me, your NaNo is something akin to a word dump. Everything that was in my head is out now, the basic story and plot lines are there, and that's good. But I have a LOT of plot holes to fill in (as you mentioned you have) and changes to make and scenes to cut, ramp up, add, delete, etc. I gave it a rest after the fun of "dumping" the story into my computer. The real work begins this week.
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