Camp NaNoWriMo 2019

For the second year in a row, I hit my word count goal for Camp NaNoWriMo! As opposed to last year's lofty 50,000 words, I went easy on myself and aimed for 15,000—and thank God for that. This month hasn't been the easiest, what with school and its negative effects on my stress levels and overall mental health, so the fact that I finished is something to be proud of. I won't go into detail about the story I was working on as 15,000 had only barely managed to scratch the surface of the story I wanted to tell, but I will tell you about what I learned throughout the process.

One of the main things I struggle with in terms of writing is determining whether that feeling of doubt I have is my gut telling me to cut my losses and move on or my perfectionist self giving up at the first sign of trouble. As someone who got her start wanting to write long-form works and only succeeding a couple of times (I can maybe count on one hands how many first drafts I've completed), I sometimes (read: often times) hit a point in my manuscript where I can kind of tell I've gone off the rails or that it's not the kind of story I want to tell, so there is that option to start anew. But there's also the knowledge that, if this were a marathon, I can't just keep going back to the start of the line every time I'm unhappy with the way I ran the first mile.

Nevertheless, I've been diligently developing this idea and these characters for a while now, and the more I test merging different elements with the very bare bones structure of the idea, the more what the story actually is and what it's meant to be reveal themselves to me.

On another positive note, I've also slowly begun to accept—and really, really believe—that the first draft doesn't have to be anything more than a rough sketch of the story. In the same way most artists, save for perhaps the most prodigious kinds, start out by sketching before finalizing their illustrations with ink, nothing about my initial draft has to be permanent until I say so. Then again, that could mean I'll forever be moving things around and never finish, but I'd like to think that at some point, I'd know when to give up (see paragraph two).

Hopefully one day I'll be able to finish this story and share it online. I find that some distance and detachment from the work helps me write better, as well as using Comic Sans, but that's neither here nor there. And just as a way of update: I've posted a modified screenplay of Ramona and the Silver Screen on Wattpad, which I wrote during another particularly rough time in my writing life, so you can read that here. As of this writing, I've got two acts up and am set to publish the rest as soon as I can.

Until the next time!

Nina