Week Two of NaNoWriMo

This week I liked Anne Rice’s Facebook page. Since I’ve been focusing a lot of my efforts on editing and rewriting I was really interested in some of her posts about how she writes. It’s always interesting to learn how writers write and edit and get their inspiration because writing is such a solitary process most of the time.

Anne Rice is the author of Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, The Witching Hour, and a ton of other books. A couple months ago I finished reading The Witching Hour which was great and frustrating and super long. (It’s over 900 pages and half of it is family history.) There’s no doubt when reading Anne Rice that she’s a fantastic author. So when I saw how she edits I was super interested and thought I would share.

“You might say I was word processing before word processors. But the point is, I never worked in drafts. I never sat down and wrote a “first draft” of anything. I wrote only through slow and polished and highly edited evolution, discarding as I went along until — by the very end — I had a completed and polished and deeply thought out and, above all, deeply felt and executed manuscript. One version of that manuscript existed, and nothing more. There was never a sloppy first draft or second draft or third draft.”

— Anne Rice

I can see a lot of benefits to this style of editing. It’s definitely not something I’ve done but I might try something like it in the future.

As far as my current project is going, it could be going better. At this point I’ve been floundering a little. Maybe a lot. So I don’t think I’ll get to 50,000 this NaNoWriMo but I do think I will eventually finish this draft because I know that finishing this draft brings me closer to my goals of being a better writer and being a published one.

I got sidetracked this week but there were a few things I added that I really think helps the story.

*Added prologue to increase drama and tension and to add more interest to the beginning of the story.

*Changed a scene where I had filler dialogue and made the dialogue actually mean something. Used it to add background information and to add emotional connection to the characters.

I’ve also started to write each scene name down along with what the key points and purpose of each scene is. I’m trying to cut the scenes that are just filler.

There’s a lot of other things that I’ve been changing and a lot of edits and add-ins that I’m going to get to in the next few weeks.

 

NaNoWriMo Stats:

Word Count: 8,304

Where It’s Supposed To Be: 23,333

Words Per Day Needed to Finish On Time: 2,453

 

Keep Writing! Even if you’re slow and get easily distracting like me.

Motto for this week: Keep Going.

 

Question for anyone reading this blog post: How do you edit/write?

I’d love to hear about your process as I’m struggling through building my own.