So the first day of NaNo went pretty well, with a 4000 word start. That’s less than I would have liked but I started on Gods which I’m less familiar with and so was finding my way a little. I even found time to spend the evening raiding with my Warcraft guild. That’s one thing NaNo has taught me… you need to sometimes take breaks, and I’m glad I did as I was pretty frazzled by the time I got to game.
Day 1 was all about establishing my protagonist, Cal. Not sure about the name, I think I might have stolen it from somewhere. If not, I can think of several stories that use characters with similar names. Doesn’t matter, names can change with a simple ‘replace all’, so I’m not gonna linger on it. There’s still a lot I don’t know about this character and some stuff I’m holding back from the reader, but I think the 4000 words yesterday helped both readers and myself learn about him.
The prose, understandably, is pretty messy. Words constantly repeat, often within the same sentence and I need to train myself to ignore this. Prose can be fixed, but I think I’ll find it’s better than I thought. Well some of it…
I’ve also noticed my first stylish difference to my other NaNo novel (which has to follow the style of the first novel I’m currently shopping to agents). Thieving King has short punchy chapters much better suited to NaNo but with Gods, there’s already a feel of longer more complex chapters.
Today is about establishing the secondary antagonist. I think the trick to NaNo (and indeed novel writing) is to pace yourself. Yes, it’s great when your heroine faces the ultimate bad guy and transforms into a god-powered transformer and –totally – kicks ass, but you have to make sure you don’t skip the majority of your novel to write that uber ending. You’ve got 30 days to build up to that ending, so have an idea where your plot goalposts are and know roughly when you should be hitting them.
Today, as well as introducing a new character, I also get to write helicopters. Helicopters in a fantasy novel? Yep, and that idea pleases me immensely. This is how I roll!
So how did your first NaNo day go? In that mess of words, what do you think you did that was pretty cool?
#NaNoWriMo Day 1
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About the Author: Adrian
Wow, that’s quite a start. I was feeling pretty chuffed with my 2k words, but that’s impressive.
I’ve been doing so much editing lately that I’d begun to fear I’d lost the knack of writing quickly, like my original writing muscle had atrophied. And that, in my view, is what Nano’s good for: confirming that you can, if you put your mind to it and schedule properly, actually get the words on the page and tell a story, and learn that discipline.
I’m feeling pretty confident about the rest of the month now. Even though I have a couple of weekends when I know I won’t be able to write, I’ve planned for them and I should be able to make up the wordcount on other days. I’m tackling book 2 of my demons. dragons and dancing girls epic fantasy. It will be fun.