1 December 2022
Stuff I wrote while reflecting on Nanowrimo.
I felt like I should take some time, now that Nanowrimo is done for the year, to look back and reflect on what I’ve learned and what I’ve accomplished.
First off, wow. This was the best Nanowrimo I’ve had since my first one, and possibly even that one, despite a slightly lower word count. I’m still parsing through why I feel that way; part of it definitely has to do with how committed I was.
I learned a lot about myself and my writing process, too. First, I need to give myself the freedom to wander around my story. If I try to force myself to write things in order, for whatever reason, it stops being fun, starts stressing me out, and my motivation gets shot. This is a bit frustrating, since I feel like having everything nice and organized would be so much simpler, but if that’s the way it needs to work for me, so be it.
Closely related to that, for the first time, I figured out how to work around outdated bits of story without being compelled to immediately rewrite them. I’ve struggled with that in the past. There’s one story I started that has 10-15 different versions of the first chapter, even though I’ve yet to finish it. (That story’s been shelved for now, but I do intend to finish it at some point.)
That wouldn’t have worked with Rapunzel. Because it was part of Nanowrimo, it felt like I couldn’t, even, and that wound up really good for me. It let me find the whole story, not just the next piece of it.
The most surprising thing I learned, though, was how much it affects my day, in a positive way, when I get up early to squeeze in and extra 20-30 minutes of writing. That wasn’t easy for me; I have to start work at 6 AM, so I needed to start getting up at 4:30 if I wanted to do that. But generally speaking, rather than feeling extra tired, I was strangely energetic and a lot happier while I was at work.
There’s also a lot of work I need to do, both to improve my writing in general and for Rapunzel specifically. In particular, a lot of my sentences were far too same-y. “So-and-so verbed X.” Part of that was because I was rushing through and put no effort into trying to make it sound better… but there’s also the fact that no other alternatives immediately sprang to ming. That’s something I’d like to work on in my daily writing over the course of the next few weeks; I’ll try to think up exercises I can do for that.
Key to that, I need to read more. I think that’ll help a lot, especially if I’m proactively paying attention to sentence structure as I read… Not that I’m good at that. It’s far too easy for me to get sucked into the story and forget everything else.
More specifically to Rapunzel, there are a lot of concerns. Isaac, for example. I want him to feel like a cool, proactive younger brother with a bit of a stubborn streak. (That part seems to run in the family.) I worry that instead, I made him too annoying or stuck up, maybe inflexible, with the added insult of general being “right”. I’ll need to think on that. There may be nothing I do about it until I get the story more polished, and get feedback from other readers to see if there actually is an issue at that point.
Another is Rapunzel’s loss of her fairy “gifts”. Supposedly, she’s been given extra beauty and cleverness, pulled from her own future. Which means once the bonus is gone, after Hannah’s sacrifice, there should be a noticeable difference. And there isn’t. I never address it, it has no consequence on the plot… It bugs me. I have a few ideas, but nothing solid yet.
The battles are also going to need a lot of work - possibly revision after revision, just to try different things out. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually fairly happy with what I came up with, and even a bit proud of it. But there are a lot more factors that I need to take into account that I forgot (like rain), and Gothel in particular should have a lot more options for things she can do in battle. I don’t want her to feel like some bog-standard D&D dragon, or worse, a brainless giant lizard. I want her to fight like it’s actually Gothel in a dragon’s body.
There’s more I could nitpick; I could probably spend hours ripping my story apart piece by piece. But those were the big things that weigh on me even now. My plan is to set the story down for the next couple weeks, maybe all of December, and pick it back up come January. I think I’d like to get the next draft done by the end of April, though I am starting online courses in February, and I don’t know how that will affect things.
I don’t know if I’ll post any of my revision work on my blog or not. I think this should be separate from my daily writings. But if that’s the only time I have to work on it, I may sneak bits in here and there.