Anyone here familiar with NaNoWriMo?
I started it in November. Initial speed and volume were promising! It has since become NaNoDeJanFeWriMo (business trips, family illnesses, various accidents, work, time constraints). Fifty thousand words is a lot of words. I figure my story is about halfway done.
Here is one thing I have learned: it is relatively easy to barf up ten thousand words. Probably this is why it is the upper limit of a feature article in the Atlantic or The New Yorker. A basic rubric:
0-10k, a lark! a walk in the park! How fun, how funny!
10-20k, ok
20-30k slower
30-40k woof
40-50k who is even writing this anymore
I am thinking of inserting some dramatic gaps in my timeline. Writing a novel is not like being a court stenographer. You aren’t listening to something that you simply record. I might just need to skip ahead and segment it. We think as writers that we must explain everything, but when our writing approaches art, it becomes clearer that the story we are telling lives in the spaces in between the words.
If you, like a certain colleague of mine, would like to read my latest material, I urge you to click on my picture gallery, which comes in direct from Instagram where I microblog my general observations and more creative flights of fancy as I take pictures around town in Florence. Go on. Do it. You know you want to. I post almost daily, and I often put a bunch of words with the images.
Other: I have ultra-professional business cards now, conducive to a writerly career. If you see me in town, I will be very excited to give you one!
