NaNoWriMo officially ended at midnight last night, but I finished my novel on Friday, and I crossed the 50,000-word mark Tuesday night (Wednesday morning). It ended at 55,197 words.
Today, I printed it all out. With single-spacing, 10 point font, tiny margins, and no page breaks, it worked out to 40 pages. (Formatted like a paperback, it's about 200 pages.) It's amazing what a thrill you get out of a stack of warm paper, knowing that you wrote all 55 thousand of those words, and in only 28 days.
It's really been a life-changing experience, much more so than I had originally thought it would be, maybe even more than for most other participants. Not to belittle their accomplishments. All 21,683 of them are incredible. And the community is one of the abolute best things in the world, especially on twitter.
But I never really liked writing. I've never been bad at it, but I've always kind of looked at English majors and aspiring writers as over-artsy dreamers. Sure, I admired their dreams, but I never understood the allure of writing, so the idea never made sense to me.
This past month, though, has opened my eyes. I have to say this has been the most fun I've had, like, ever. The thrill of creation. And it's even cheaper than crochet and cross-stitch. Especially near the end, when my plot and my characters started to take over every moment of my thoughts. It took on a life of its own for the last 25,000 words or so. It was a real thrill, and something addicting. NaNoWriMo has become a part of me. I don't think I'll ever get over the writing bug.
Yet I just wrote a bunch of sentence fragments.
'K then. I hope some of my dear readers will consider writing their own month-long novel next November. Check it!
Much love,
-Ganchi
4 comments:
You see now that you're a writer those aren't fragments, they're poetic. The rules of grammar only apply to us un-initiated folks.
Well, some of them anyway, but given how insistent grammarians are on some of the silliest and irrelevant ones I can understand the sentiment. (I'm an anti-grammarian; I believe in speaking properly and comprehensibly and believe grammarians go about it all wrong.) Take for example the sentence thing. A complete thought, they tell us, is a sentence, or a sentence is a complete thought. A sentence must have also a certain grammatical structure: it must at the least comsist of a verb, commas separate two thoughts but only one complete thought must go per sentence, and yadayadayada about the technicalitiess of deciding what constitutes a complete thought, all shoved down our throats as part of critiquing our sentences. I appreciate the opinion on how to make the sentences clear to other people. But stop giving me your philosophical opinion of what a thought takes to be complete!! If I want to think that "Bed," is a complete thought, there's nothin' wrong with that!
Anyway, I'm kinda mixed here about the thing with the name that sounds like someone wanted an acronym but didn't have any vowels. On the one hand I'm glad you discovered the joy of writing. On the other, I'm still wary of this thing's attempt to squash as much writing as it does into as little time as it does. It strikes me as many people could come out of such a project saying, "Gee, writing stinks," and mean the writing equivalent of speed-reading stinks but not realize that's hardly what all writing is like.
You should write a 50,000 word rant. It would be really easy.
Assuming I didn't care whether I was comprehensible, it might be. You'd be surprised how many of my rants have never made it onto paper (or that electronic equivalent) due to the difficulties of formulating the whole problem in a manner that flows well and covers all aspects.
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