"This year I'm again writing a historical novel, but this time I'm doing it with absolutely no prior research, writing on the fly in an effort to get the basic story into a full rough draft ... Once finished with the rough draft, my next step will be to do the research and then return to my manuscript ... In doing so, I'm inspired by the example of Kevin Guilfoile, who admits to using the write-it-all-out-and-fix-the-details-later approach."
That's Pete from the litblog PeteLit explaining why how he met the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge this year. For the fifth time in his life, he's trying to write a 50,000-word novel draft in November.
I'm happy to hear he survived the process, and I'd like to remind my readers that the the write-it-all-out-and-fix-the-details-later approach is one of the best things a writer can do. Following that crazy advice, I crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line last year. I'm still doing the "fix the details" part though.
How is your writing project coming along? Drop us a line and I'll post your answers...
Still no 50,000 words -- I finished with just over 37,000 this year, and I'm no more than two-thirds of the way towards finishing the novel. But taking this less-fussy approach (plus not caring if I got anywhere near the 50K target) definitely made things more pleasant this year, and I now have the skeleton of a novel I'm pretty pleased with. Whether or not I ever go back and fill in the details, now, that's anyone's guess. I wouldn't bet on it.
Posted by: Pete | November 30, 2006 4:10 PM | Permalink to Comment