NaNoWriMo Wrap-up: 30 Days of Sucktitude

Wow.

I had a few goals during NaNoWriMo:

1. Get used to sucking
2. Develop a regular writing habit
3. Figure out the plot of the novel I've been thinkin' about 

I was, I think, sesquisuccessful -- I kinda got used to sucking (say, 80%), kinda figured out more about the plot (say, 60%), and almost completely blew the whole "writing habit" thing (10%).

I figured that to write 50,000 words in one month, I'd have to create a special writing schedule, figure out what time of day I was most productive . . . nope. It was pretty much regurgitate one or two thousand words at the last possible moment, right before crashing for the night, and rarely did I feel like I was mentally at my best. The idea of writing a half hour or so before work -- I think I tried it *once*, was happy with it, and never tried it again.

So that kind of sucks.

Lessons learned:

1) Writing is Hard.

I mean, I knew it was hard before, but goddamn . . . there's so much stuff to juggle, I had no idea how difficult it was to keep it all in the air at once. And then I realized that not only are there twelve balls to keep in the air instead of three, but that I wasn't really competent at even juggling *one*. Hell with high-level stuff like character development, just describing two people talking in a realistic way is tough.

When I started NaNoWriMo, I was worried about lining up story arcs with character arcs, about the differences between third person limited "close" and "distant," about worldbuilding.

Now, I'm worried about how to describe one person talking to another without the action looking like that from a Geico xtranormal video. Or describing a pair of pants. Or a haircut. Or a hat -- no, that's not true. I'm not even close to being brave enough to try to describe a hat. 

Indeed, I yearn for the day when I will be courageous enough to attempt to describe a hat. Until then ...

2) I should have more respect for hack writers.

They way I now see it, writing a novel is like carving a puzzle by hand one piece at a time. The puzzle can be "easy" -- two dimensional characters, cliched plot, similar character voices, uninspired dialogue -- but just because it looks simple and may not be mentally challenging, it still takes a lot of skill to do the rest of it well.

So, for instance, this puzzle is pretty easy:

But if I had to hand-carve each of those pieces, and guarantee that by the end that each piece would be flush with its neighbors, well . . . I'd be pretty much screwed.

So I'm a little less judgmental now ... for the time being ;). It's not only tough to get it all right, or most of it right, it's tough to get even a quarter of it right -- so my hat is off to those that can do even that much well.

Bastards.