The first thing I did today for my inaugural Camp NaNoWriMo project was abandon my chosen project.
This happened to be my failed 2013 NaNoWriMo novel, Start of the World. Instead I decided to take another stab at my failed 2015 effort, Weirdsmith. One advantage here is I’d only written about 5,000 words of Weirdsmith before abandoning it, so it’s easy to start over rather than figure out what to do with a larger chunk of text (as would have been the case with Start of the World).
I also happened to come up with just enough ideas and little hooks while running today to give the story an overall arc, something it never really had last year. I still wasn’t sure what the opening scene was going to be when I sat down to write, and having now written 1,780 words (above the required minimum of 1,667) I’m still not convinced this won’t all blow up in my face like one of Wile E. Coyote’s inventions. Still, it was nice to write something longer than an amusing cat image.
I’ll mull over whether to switch to first person perspective before starting tomorrow’s session. On the one hand, first person has an immediacy that I find appealing. As a bonus, it’s easier to find the protagonist’s voice, though there is a danger in making it too much your voice. If I’m undecided by the time I’m writing again I’ll stick to third person to at least keep things consistent.
Hopefully tomorrow’s update won’t be a picture of me sobbing into a bottle of Jack Daniels.
