November's Novel…

Lots of folks are participating Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month. It’s a worthy effort to encourage writers to produce a novel in a month (duh!). In this case by novel they mean a work of 50,000 words minimum. Commercially that’s not a novel (80K words minimum), but there is no sense in quibbling. Stringing together that many words is an accomplishment, and having the basics down gives a writer something to work from.

As the old saying goes, “Nary a spade of earth has been turned just by thinking about it.”

Last month I started a new novel: In Hero Years… I’m Dead. It’s a weird sort of superhero novel. I have no contract for it, but I’m having a blast working on it. I’m learning a lot and doing a lot of things I don’t normally do in a novel. This is all good.

So, in the spirit of Nanowrimo, I thought I’d track the book’s progress here. I’ll let you know what’s going on with things, how much I’m getting done, and general impressions. It’s the first time I’ve done this sort of thing, so I have no idea what kind of detail I’ll go into. Whatever feels right, I guess.

So, through October, working on 11 different days, I’ve gotten through 11 chapters. That comes to a total of 25,827 words. We’re looking at roughly a chapter per working day, with the chapters averaging out just under 2,500 words each. That’s fairly standard for my books.

The story is first person, which makes it much easier and faster for me to write.

Today I added one chapter at 2,649 words, for a running total of 28,478. (Heh, here’s the first secret I’ll reveal to the world: my math skills are horrible.) I just have a ledger sheet and add things up.

I should also note that I have a synopsis for the story, but am only outlining two or three chapters ahead of where I am at the moment. I’ve used this technique before and it works pretty well, especially with first-person novels. The lack of overlapping storylines from multiple viewpoint characters means I don’t really need a rigid outline. I walk down to Starbucks in the morning, have coffee, jot notes, run dialogue as I walk home, make more notes and start writing. It’s regular and keeps my head in the novel.

At this point in the book we’ve introduced most of the major players, the conflicts and have laid the groundwork for everything that will follow. If I discover new stuff, I’ll make notes about it in the draft and keep working forward. All foreshadowing and evening up can be done in rewrite.

The book ought to come out around 100,000 words.