Week Two

Week one ended with the realization that my word count could only increase if I did some revising. I certianly wasn’t looking forward to it. I like to take the often-given writing advice to put your draft in a drawer for a few weeks or months, and then have a fresh manuscript to work with. The problem with that was that I wanted to finish the whole draft in thirty days.

In some cases, that advice isn’t the best. That’s what I’ve learned during the second week of NaNoWriMo. Yes, when you have a fairly complete draft, it’s great advice, but my draft was far from that.

I’m adding things that the reader might wish to know, such as background about the characters, which I didn’t do when I speed-wrote the first 30,000 words last week. I also realized that I didn’t much like what I’d made of the ending. There was a great deal of narrative summary, which is fine in some cases, but this stuff didn’t add anything at all to the story. It also wasn’t very long, so I started removing those sections and expanding them with dialog and action at full experiential volume.

I’ve done that, and now the first draft is finished at 50,030 words in two weeks. There is more work to do, but that will have to wait for revision.