So far, the one thing I’ve noticed with regards to NaNoWriMo is that I have absolutely no patience for description.  I tend to write as though it were a slightly glorified screenplay treatment.  This isn’t terrible, per se (c.f. Chuck Palahnuik), but sometimes I wish I had retained my younger sensabilites to actually describe a setting.  I think it all went downhill when I realized a few years ago that I spend a lot of time describing sunsets for no good reason.  I was writing and I said, “Goddamn, I write a lot about sunsets.”  And that has bothered me ever since.

(this post got kinda long, sorry)

Anyway.  I’m on chapter five of the novel, and I find myself skipping through transitions (making them essentially CUT TO’s, to continue the screenplay analogy), spending more time introducing characters.  Not sure what to think of that.  Obviously it’s important to get some character information, but I find it more intriguing to describe other characters (i.e., not the protagonist) in more detail, especially when dealing with first person narrative.  Thus, the two protagonists in VZW, Sam the werewolf and Delia the vampire, are barely known, but other characters are more fleshed out.  This makes sense, because if I am the narrator, I would not talk about myself as much as I would about other people.  Sam’s not going to describe the jacket he’s wearing, for example, but he will describe someone else’s jacket.  Delia, however, would describe her clothes, if only to show off.

Delia, for the record, is a lesbian.  Or at least she pretends to be.  She has had sex with men before but she finds deeper love with women.  This has recently been confounded with her becoming a vampire.  I won’t go into it, but it involves love triangles, Stacey (the napalm girl), and stuff like that.

I enjoy writing Delia because she’s still sarcastic even in harsh circumstances (such as fighting back zombies).  Sam has his quirks too but I haven’t been able to delve into them, other than his apparent alcoholism.  He’s been too busy saving Eddie’s life, and his own, to drink like a fish.  So we’ll see where that goes.

It kind of dawned on me last night that 10,000 words is one-fifth of this novel, and I have barely scratched the surface of what’s going on here.  I think.  Obviously I can’t be sure because I have no idea where it’s going.  I have a basic plot device, a very brittle skeleton, and a few interesting characters.  I have no intentions of writing anything longer than 50,000 words, so whatever is going to happen to these characters better happen quickly.  I think this is my favorite part of NaNoWriMo, something that I wish could be looked into further — the necessity of ending what you’re writing.  Some people go past 50,000 words and write 100k, 150k, sometimes even 200k novels.  Let me guarantee you that all of those novels are fantasy.  Fantasy authors can’t ever stop writing because their novels aren’t about stories, they’re about settings, and anyone could write about a fantastical setting for hours and hours until the cows came home.  That’s why I insist on my novel being an “adventure” rather than a “fantasy” novel; that genre requires me to have an ending, and will force me to think in a way where my ending can come around the 50,000 word line.

My philosophy on things like this isn’t really to write 50,000 words of shit.  I think that’s kind of the wrong way to direct people.  NaNoWriMo is all about writing “quantity” over “quality,” and just spouting words on the page until you hit 50,000 words.  Which is a strategy, sure, but it won’t get you a book deal.  A first draft may be shitty in that characters are awkward and two-dimensional, dialogue is stale, and settings are uninspired, but that doesn’t mean it has to be shit.  I’ve pushed myself into some kind of “hyper editing” mode, where I try to write the best thing that I can in that moment.  It’s a fallacy in its own right — no one can write the best thing the first time, unless you’re incredibly gifted — but it has merits.  It forces you to analyze the choices you make in real time, and quickly.  So if a situation occurs on the page and you’re not sure what to do with it, you spend less time thinking and more time writing by quickly making a choice, but at the same you’re trying to make the most logical, high stakes choice that you can, something that will bump your narrative up to the next level.

This, in a nutshell, is how you write a play, and I’m sure plenty of Creative Writing majors have seen a diagram similar to the ones we see in Playwriting class: a literal line of action, starting from the bottom and making its way to the top, the climax, with peaks and valleys of rising and falling action, and ending ultimately with the deneoument where things are calmer but nothing can go back to the way it was.  I think that a lot of authors disregard this essential formula for writing an engaging work of writing.  I’ve read lots of stories and books where nothing really happens.  It always bugs me.  Things must happen in stories!  If you’ve ever heard anyone tell a story outloud, especially a good one, you’ll realize that a good story is one where things happen!  People take risks, make mistakes, there’s tension that rises and rises and then something extraordinary happens (the climax), and then that’s about it.  And it’s good.  You’re riveted.

And then you go home and open the latest book you’re reading, and it’s twenty pages of nothing.  People talking.  A lavish description of a setting.  Boring.  I’d rather have a book where shit happens, rather than a book of glorious settings and wonderous use of adjectives for a hundred pages.  That is old school writing.  That is 19th century, “get paid by the word” writing.  It’s antiquated and annoying.

And now I’ve rambled for a thousand words, a thousand words that could’ve gone into my novel.  Heh.

I will say that I am enjoying this novel far better than any one previous novel that I worked on.  It’s fun because I’m being looser with the story material than before.  I just hope I don’t write myself into a rut, like I usually do.

Do you enjoy the novel?  Do you have questions, comments, etc?  I’d love to hear them.