NaNoBlog 2002

NaNoBlog 2002
30 days. 50,000 words. No sweat.

Sunday, February 02, 2003

Happy Groundhog Day! Lately I've been doing some line editing and copy editing on my NaNo novel. I've taken out or shortened some of the extraneous words & phrases I had used to boost word count, filled in a few details I skipped the first time through, & clarified some sections. I haven't done any major revisions such as rearranging scenes or chapters, or adding or deleting scenes, though I suspect it needs that. I'm not sure if I did a decent job of plotting or of maintaining tension throughout, and I'm not sure it exactly has a climax! (It has a turning point near the end but it may be too vague.)

It still stuns me that I wrote it, though. I can't figure out how I did it, & can't imagine doing it again! I've written a few short things since November (or more accurately, finished some things I had started prior to November), & wrote about 30 pages of a children's chapter book (some of which an editor critiqued for me & thought had an unworkable premise!), but am having trouble focusing on the other novel I need to finish.

I just entered the first chapter of my NaNo novel in a regional writing contest, & was iffy about it because I think the first chapter may be one of the weakest, but the idea of rethinking and rewriting it, even with a month to think about it, seemed more daunting than writing the whole novel in less than a month! (And my husband liked it, so I went ahead & sent it.) I may get a writing friend to critique that chapter soon. The standard advice is to start a book with action (or at least an actual scene) instead of narration or character introductions, as my book starts now, but this is a young adult novel, which may be a different animal, as voice and character are so important in YA fiction. Also, the book is about my character figuring out who she is & where she fits in, so it may be appropriate to start the way I do now, with her musing about those things. Who knows?

posted by Alison | 1:55 PM