Nano Post-Mortem

76,388 words at the close of NaNoWriMo, the first time I've ever reached 50k. More amazingly, I wrote the big climax on Saturday and today I did the denouement, so all that's left are the gaping holes I left behind. The great big battle, the plot threads all meeting up, everything unravelling and then tied back together. That's an entire novel in a month, pretty much. And that's with no outline and relatively little idea of what I wanted to do, just a little 2k ficlet I scribbled out at the end of October. I'm pleased enough with the story, it remains to be seen if I like how it unfolded. Mostly I'm surprised and delighted that, without planning, it grew organically into something I like so much. I've always been a pantser but this is the first time I dove quite so enthusiastically into something with no ideas except for what popped up as I went along.

I'm sure that lacking any conceivable plan would have been more complicated if I weren't writing a fairy tale retelling, and no matter how far it strayed from its roots I still had the basic plot to guide me along. Boy did this story mosey way, way off the beaten path. It became less about a girl spinning shirts from nettles and more about realizing she's a foreigner from fairy-land and what it's like to have a god/fairy for a mother who wasn't so good at being human as an excitable eight-year-old remembers. Also coming to grips with just how much her brothers sheltered her--or didn't.

I went into this with no ideas other than:
1. Somebody's gotta punch the king (check!)
2. More sibling interaction (oh yeah!)

Everything else basically unfolded from a few other questions I had about Wild Swans/Six Swans:
1. Why do they change back into men at night? Are they some kinda magical night people?
2. What does it do to your mental health to have animal helpers?
3. What kind of person overwhelms magical toads and turns them into poppies by passive acts of goodness?
4. ...How did that person end up being the wild child I wrote?

Who knows how much of that will stay if I ever revisit this. The fairy thing popped up as a random idea, and amoeba-like, it absorbed the rest of the story into a fun-to-write snowball. Then there was the realization that there are more men in this cast than in any other thing I've written (four main female characters versus ten main male), which should feel weirder than it does.

The story started off with my quirky, cynically whimsical fairy tale voice, but as the manuscript went on I can feel it devolving into my "regular" voice. The story's definitely poised between a light-hearted skimming over a dark story, or a story with some real wildness to it, and I'm not entirely sure which side it's going to fall on but either way it's going to need a crapton of editing. This also brought a bunch of my writerly insecurities to the surface--anything from form to characterization to grasping human experience and frankly I didn't expect this project to be the one that made me go "oh god! I can't write XYZ and I never will because it's outside my ability to comprehend!"

Or maybe on the re-read I'll see that it's still pretty good. Reading first drafts is always a harrowing experience, a mixture of the affection and seething hatred you feel when a particularly dumb pet does something cute and then follows it up by shitting in your favorite shoes.

I like this system of just tossing out the whole draft in a month, I've never churned out anything so fast before. I'd definitely consider doing this again, though I don't know how replicable it is. Looking back for nano, I averaged about 2,500 words a day--more by steadily sticking to a 2,000 to 3,000 word range than having huge writing sprees. I had a few here and there (broke 4k four times over the month) but it seems that even when I give myself all day to write, I only manage to knock out about 2,500 words before my energy peters out. I would have liked to do more, but it seems like I can't be an all day writer at the moment, so this is good enough. I'm pleased I got as much done as I did, particularly since I circled the drain for about five days or so with no idea where to go or what to do and writing 500 to 1,000 words/day in little bits here and there. A problem I solved with a monster attack that not only got me over the hump that was stalling me, but also dragged almost all the plot threads into position for tying up. When in doubt, add more monsters.

Now... the question is going to be what in the world I hit up next, because for the most part writing at this pace pushed out my desire to do anything else, except a few spurts here and there for Stormwright that assured me I don't hate it nearly as much as I thought I did.