Wednesday 27 October 2004

Pic of the day: Actually, she turned out to be just like her mother, only even smarter. Just thought you wanted to know. ^_^

So, about NaNoWriMo...

You may have seen it in movies. I know I've seen it in anime, but I think in at least one other movie too. One of the characters has a favorite spot where he or she retreats when things get too heavy. This is somewhere in the hills above the city, and standing there the characters can see an ocean of light from the homes and shops and streets below, glittering like thousands of jewels in the dark.

Well, this is how I have it with my NaNoWriMo novel of this year, except one small detail. I am standing in the hillside above one of those small Norwegian agricultural villages where decades of modernization has caused fewer and larger units, to the point where there was no longer enough people for the local post office, and then for the shop, and the school, and, and ... and now there are only a couple scattered points of light spread through the valley.

The scattered points of light, if this wasn't obvious, represents the plot points of my supposed novel-to-be.

This story seemed like a good idea. You can't go wrong with supernatural romance: Margit Sandemo has sold more than 100 of those and she used to just write straight through them, never editing anything except typos. And it shows. But they are still fun to read, and they still sell like hotcakes in Scandinavia, Finland and Poland. (I don't think they are translated into other languages than those. Possibly Icelandic? Certainly not English, for some reason.)

And I had a few ideas too. But as Robert J. Sawyer says, "I have enough ideas already to write books for the rest of my life." (He is pestered by people wanting to sell him their "good" ideas.) Ideas are like stray cats, you take in a couple of them and suddenly there are more and more until they swarm all over the kitchen counters and roost on top of your bookshelves.

***

So what went wrong the two previous years? Because this is the third year I sign up for NaNoWriMo, and I failed both of the two earlier years, even though the goal was simply to write a novel of 50 000 words, no quality required.

Looking back (which is fairly easy when you have a daily journal) I largely have to blame it on the hand. Not the Hand of Fate, but the one attached to my right arm. Because when I start typing a lot, it starts hurting a lot. Both years I tried to use speech-recognition software, but ended up typing a lot anyway. Partly this is because the quality of the software (and, it turned out, the hardware) was simply not good enough to substitute for typing. I have been typing since around the time I started school, and I'm pretty good at it. I make quite a few mistakes, but I type so fast that I can correct those and still keep up with my thinking. And to put it simply: Typing is a way of thinking. When you have done it for between 30 and 40 years, things are simply wired into your brain. There must be millions if not billions of synapses dedicated to this manner of thinking throughout my brain. You can't just discard this overnight. Besides, my throat got sore from all the dictating. I'm not used to talking much, certainly not clearly in English.

Anyway, speech-recognition could not substitute for typing. And typing caused pain. And pain caused me to eventually stop or slow down so much that I couldn't finish in time. But this was not the only thing that held me back.

The first year I had a really good way of organizing my book for the purpose of writing as much as possible: There were several independent storylines set in the same world, so if I got stuck in one storyline I could simply write on another. In the unlikely case that they got stuck in them all, I could just start a new. I did have some ideas for bringing some of them together, perhaps even all of them in the end. But I never came that far. One of the storylines, the funniest and most interesting, was simply too indecent. I suppose this is to be expected when one of the main characters is a succubus, but anyway I got ashamed of my own writing and this was a major reason why I gave up.

The second year I did better. This was a more normal novel, not a collection of short stories. And even though I did not finish on time, I kept writing a bit into December. Then I made a fatal mistake, at least fatal for the novel. I gave in to the muse in my head and wrote the last three chapters even though the story had not progressed that far. Having read the end of the story, I was no longer motivated to write it. After all, I already knew the ending, so why bother? The inspiration left and never came back.

***

This time I don't know the ending. Actually I don't know much at all. I know a few characters and a rather important thing that is going to happen to the local community. The muses in my head have already drifted away because so much time has passed and nothing has happened. But perhaps they'll be back if I start writing. Or perhaps I'll change my mind a few minutes before I start writing, and write a completely different story. I hear this is pretty common when doing NaNoWriMo.