Hello readers, welcome back. Spencer here with a writing update.
So this year I participated in NaNoWriMo. For those not deep in the writing life, it’s a non-profit-backed call to action to all writers to write 50,000 words of a new novel’s first draft during the month of November. Happy to report, I was a winner! Just barely. I wrote 50,004 words. It was an interesting challenge, fast-paced, and took lots of time and dedication to accomplish. It gave me a better understanding of the type of discipline it takes to match what essentially is the well-known daily word count of Stephen King. (His is a self-reported 2,000 and to beat NaNoWriMo you need to do 1667 a day to reach 50 thousand by the end of the month.) With that said, it’s not undoable, and I managed to accomplish it while working 50+ hours a week at my day job. Oh to imagine what I might accomplish with this being my full-time job. Buy me a coffee here if you’d like to help make that a reality.
With that said, while I appreciated the drive that NaNoWriMo gives you, the pace of writing didn’t quite fit my usual style. I found myself at times wanting to take the time to develop the plot and stories a bit more mentally, but feeling like if I didn’t just get the words down I wouldn’t be able to maintain my pace. Speaking of which, there is a graph below that showcases that I did exactly that, keep pace. I would write to my word count, and on some days just slightly above, in an effort to just finish the challenge.
This sort of pace makes it so that you don’t self-edit much, or really, that you don’t have the time to self-edit much. It’s good for getting words down on a page but definitely isn’t suited to all types of novels. Luckily, the idea I had for my new novel was one that was heavily conversation-based and focused entirely in one setting. This made it easy to just play with the characters and develop their personalities in a variety of scenarios and really delve deep into who they were and how they acted and interacted with each other. Had I been working on my big trilogy of novels in this challenge, I may have felt that the quality of my work had suffered, however, due to the type of novel I chose to write in the challenge – it actually worked well.
Not to say that the novel is done or anywhere near being a final product. I imagine it needs another 25,000 – 50,000 words for me to be able to wrap up the story, and it will need a major dose of editing. Yet I am still very proud of what it was I was able to accomplish during this month, and am happy that I have joined the community that NaNoWriMo has helped flourish over the years. I look forward to continuing this project, which as of now is tentatively titled The Man on the Couch, and is primarily a story about a man who loses his job and is dumped by his girlfriend, winding up on his best friend’s couch after that same friend has just recently moved into a new apartment with his girlfriend… as told by the narrator, the apartment itself. It’s been really fun to write and I can’t wait to be able to share more of it with you all.
Until then, check out my other book! By the way, my Press53 promo code is still running for a 53% discount off that book until January if you buy it directly through me.(It’s also available on Amazon with no promo.) That promo code is special because of my poem getting placed into the Press53 January 2024 edition soon to come. If you didn’t read about me winning Press53’s Prime 53 Poem Summer Challenge, now’s your chance.
I’ll try to check back in here before the end of the year. Feel free to hit me on socials in the meantime. Adios!
