I am now half-way through November, National Novel Writing Month, and I just passed the half-way mark in my novel. Even writing the phrase “my novel” makes me chuckle a bit, as it just sounds so silly. But, I’ve been very surprised by what has happened.

First, I am actually writing every day. It has been many years since I did this, and I have forgotten how much I enjoy writing purely for myself on a regular basis. (This blog doesn’t count, as the writing I do here can hardly be called regular.) I figured that if I wrote 1,667 words a day, I would hit 50,010 on the 30th, so that was my goal. As you can see in the image above, I have passed 25,000 words, and am actually a few hundred ahead of my goal. [note: For those of you digging through my archives, it says 25,372 on 11/15/2007, and this image linked to a badge that displayed the word count. NaNoWriMo has since changed the path so it links to the current year's word count. I have deleted the image to avoid confusion.]

I have also discovered some amazing ways to procrastinate, including using Google Documents for the first time. Most of the novel is being written in the word processor, but I am also using the spreadsheet to keep track of my word counts. The procrastination comes into play when I do neat little things like plot my actual words against my goal in a lovely graph, as seen below:

As you can also see, this same type of procrastination got me off to a slow start. But, when I got upgraded to business class on my flight back from LA, I began in earnest. I also don’t feel too bad, as I just looked at the stats at nanowrimo.org and realized that I am actually quite ahead of the average, which seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000.

I have also learned much about what it takes to create a piece of pure fiction, from an idea all the way through execution. When I take a break and watch a little TV, I notice I am looking at it from the perspective of how the writer put it together. I am sure I will have more to say about this after I am done, but for now, it has made me far more supportive of the WGA strike. I am beginning to recognize how much truly bad writing there already is (and that includes most of the professionals now walking the pickets lines), and how important it is for the studios to have good writers working for them.

But by far the most surprising thing has been the writing itself. Every advice giver says about writing that you must put aside time to write. When you do so, that is when you figure out what you will write, and I have discovered this to be quite true. I have roughly outlined what the arc of the story is, done general character sketches and the like, but I never know what the story is actually going to do until the words hit the page. I had one character who I originally was going to make quite nasty, and it turns out that he might even be the hero of the story. I was going to give him a sidekick who was really quite dumb, but this sidekick has been no sidekick at all, and is one of the more intelligent characters of the book. The story itself was adapted from a string of letters I wrote to S (I started over from scratch, using only my memory and a few notes, lest anyone accuse me of cheating) while we lived on separate coasts, intended as a sort of playful, children’s book type love story. It has turned into something quite different, less of a love story and more of a parable about faith and free will. Basically the original idea of lovers being separated by a vast distance has morphed into a book whose central idea is based around the question, “What would happen if the children of Adam and Eve were to meet the Serpent?”

I have no illusions about the overall quality of this work. I know it is bad and am not harboring dreams of getting it published. But, sometimes, in the middle of a passage, I am really quite amazed at the idea, or words, or plot turn, that just hit the page. It is almost like there is something else inside me deciding where it wants to go. That sounds really lame and pretentious, as I have heard far too many artists make that same claim, but this is really the first time I have experienced it personally, and it is really surprising.

Anyway, thought I’d post an update. S and I are leaving the country on Sunday, and hopefully I’ll be able to spend some of the flight time cranking out more words. Unfortunately, I know it will be much more difficult, as I plan on posting here as well. I guess I’d better up my word quota for the next few days.