NaNoWriMo Day 13
Welcome to my little experiment, where I lift the curtain on my writing process during NaNoWriMo 2023 in an effort to feel less alone. If you’re also doing NaNoWriMo, feel free to add me as a buddy!
daily summary 📅
The thing about writing is that it’s not quite like two steps forward, one step back so much as one long spiral where it feels like you’re constantly doubling back on yourself, but when you look back, you discover you’ve actually made some progress.
As far as story goes, I’ve not made it far in the draft itself, but I have been spending a lot of time word vomiting my long, shitty synopses to help propel me through the narrative. No daily process today because I’ve spent the vast majority of it just word vomiting by hand into my bullet journal and it’s too long and too spoilery to transcribe. I often think of writing a book a bit like the way I would do art: starting with sketches, then moving to thumbnails, then pencils, ink, color, background…all the way until I have a finished piece of work. I always think of drafting as the pencils phase, but in truth, it’s more like the sketch and thumbnail phase—the bad words are the sketches, the long, shitty synopses are the thumbnails. I keep erasing and re-sketching because I don’t like the composition or the angles or the lighting or whatever. I have to remember that this, too, is work. Just because I don’t come out of NaNoWriMo with a pencil drawing doesn’t mean I’m not progressing.
I just have to keep remembering that.
That’s Day 12 of NaNoWriMo done! How about y’all? Any successes? Failures?
