Day 2: Camp NaNoWriMo

Camp NaNoWriMo is not an actual summer camp, in the sense that it is only a virtual camp. It is also not a more fabulous version of NaNoWriMo; essentially, it is just NaNo but in June and August instead of November. The only real differences are that you aren't grouped into communities by where you live -- instead, there are "cabins" made up of six random people from across the world and you offer each other emotional support (writing 1667 words a day is stressful) and writing tips -- and that in August, when I completed Camp NaNo, you have thirty-one days to reach 50,000 words instead of thirty.

I wrote 50,000 words, but not of just one novel. I could have finished off one of the two novels I've been writing recently, but I decided to fulfil my promises and co-author two novels. The first, which took me twenty of the thirty-one days to complete my half of, was written with a friend and is about a man with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). The second, written with my Grandad, is a sequel to a pair of books (the first a novella, the second a novel) that he wrote and I proof-read about some soldiers who start up a business.

The challenging thing about co-authoring a novel as opposed to writing it alone is that, whenever you have a sudden burst of inspiration and want to change something, you have to go through it with the other author and change their chapters as well as yours. I found that it forced me to keep quite rigidly to the plot we'd come up with, which was interesting -- at least until the last chapter, where I pretty much just made it up as I went.

Another difficulty with the way I did NaNo this time around was the sudden change halfway through: a different novel, a different writing style, a different plot, a whole new cast of characters. The hardest part of NaNoWriMo is to get into the flow of it -- the first  few days of perseverance set you up for the rest of the month, as your momentum carries you forward. With a break in the middle to swap novels, I lost that momentum and had to build up speed all over again.

Bad physics metaphors aside, I enjoyed the month of writing. Most notably, I wrote 50,000 words without there being a single death (at least, not that I remember) in either novel. That must be some sort of record for me, as my two areas of writing expertise are character-based stories and stories about death.

No doubt I'll talk about these novels again when I run out of things to say later this month, but for now that's it. Tomorrow I'm going on a university open day so I'll be in London until pretty late, and I might end up having to write two posts on Tuesday if I don't have the time tomorrow.

Blog Every Day September

Blog Every Day April/August (known as BEDA) is exactly what it sounds like; you write one blog post every day for a month. I, however, wanted to do this in September - so welcome to day one of BEDS.

There's a lot I want to talk about this month -- most notably Camp NaNoWriMo (but more about that tomorrow) --  and there are a lot of posts I've been meaning to write for a while. For the most part, expect the four Open University blogs I promised, some book reviews, an update on what I've been writing lately, and some inexplicable ramblings about language and unusual words.

I've essentially spent my summer writing and worrying about university. Unsurprisingly, I've finally decided that I'm going to study English Literature at uni, and the list of universities I want to apply for is very nearly complete. I'm going to an open day at University College London on Monday, though I don't think I'll end up applying there because of the price of accommodation.

In tandem with my decision to study English came the realisation that, besides Shakespeare, I've never read anything written before 1800. I'm currently trying to become more well-read both from older books and from 20th century novels, in preparation for university.

So happy September everyone, and I look forward to writing twenty-nine more blog posts.

I wrote some stuff...

I seem to have done nothing but write in the two weeks since my exams finished, so I'm going to give you a little update on what I've been writing.

I spent a couple of days editing Courage To Live, my NaNoWriMo novel, before I realised how much of a ridiculously huge task editing was going to be and since then I haven't so much as looked at it. The NaNo novel I wrote the year before that, Seven For A Secret, has long since been condemned as appalling and terrible and I'm surprised I ever wrote again. After flicking through it I found a couple of paragraphs which were actually good and decided to turn my 50,000 word novel into a 7,000 word short story. The story has the same very basic plot (in that the main character's sister dies) only the chapters are replaced with letters. Not like abc letters, but letters that go in an envelope and get a stamp on them. I wrote the first of seven letters and then got bored.

Due to the boredom, I wrote another short story about a woman called Gemma who can tell when people are about to die. It ends in a death, because somehow that always seems to happen. Mid-year resolution: stop writing about death.

I'm now 1,878 words into a novel I'm co-authoring with my Grandad. We've had a project going in which he writes books and I edit them (by which I mean I alter the writing and not the content), and it has resulted in two self-published novel(la)s. The third will hopefully be around 50,000 words if we can stretch the plot that far. So far, I'm having fun with characters that are not my creation. The whole writing a novel thing is less daunting when half of it is being written by someone else.

Something which is brand new to me is the writing of poetry. I seem to be okay at it, though occasionally it descends into gibberish just so I can make it rhyme. I definitely need more practice.

And now I have a chapter to finish!

Steeple.

Microsoft Word does not believe that steeple is a verb. I used the phrase steepled fingers and a red squiggly line appeared under the word in a "What do you think you are doing?" kind of way; naturally, I Googled (ah - I'll get back to this) it and found the dictionary definition:

To provide with or form into a steeple or steeple-like configuration.

A steeple is basically a spire, so the verb to steeple means to make into a spire-like shape. If you press the fingertips of your two hands together keeping your palms a few centimetres apart, it does indeed make the shape of a cone -- or a spire.

Maybe I find this more interesting that it is, but the process of creating verbs of nouns is one of the more noticeable progressions of language. To Google, for example, is not recognised as a real word by the powers that be -- i.e., people who write dictionaries -- but I bet you use it. Eventually, common usage will probably mean that there won't be a little red line under it in any program with a spellchecker (another verb from a noun). 

Sort of ironically, the only term I know of for this process is verbing, or alternatively verbification, which is simply not as cool. The word verb is a noun and by making it into the word verbing you are actually verbing it. In order to verb verb you must first have a verb meaning to verb and, well, there you have a weird and wonderful word paradox. 

The blogger spellchecker hates me right now.

 

Names

In The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, two characters who get married have names meaning Prince and Princess; here, obviously, their names indicate their relationship to each other. In The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, Augustus - the name of a Roman emperor - is referred to by his full name when he is strong and confident, and when he is weak and pitiful he is simply called Gus, which sounds more like the nickname of a child.

Character names needn't be as meaningful as this; any name has connotations. A name like Felicity implies that the character is quite feminine, whereas Taylor as a girls' name suggests the opposite. A plain name such as John might be given to an equally plain character.

A story I'm currently writing is about faeries (the ones with courts and queens - not the ones that like flowers and live at the bottom of your garden), so I've been using a lot of Irish names for characters. One character, a hobgoblin, is named Beagan, meaning small one, because hobgoblins are typically represented as small faeries; Eliana, whose name means sun, rules the Summer Court; a selkie - a type of water faerie - is named Muirin, meaning born of the sea. For most of my characters, I searched for a name that would suit them, but in some cases it was a name with an interesting meaning that inspired me to create a corresponding character.

So it's always a good idea to look up the meaning of a name before you use it for a character. Baby name websites are good for this, and for getting ideas for names in the first place. I spend more time on baby name websites than can be healthy.

Setting Out

Block one of my Open University course - Start Writing Fiction - gives a few tips on what to do before you start writing.

• Make sure you know enough about the characters, setting, and plot. I've mentioned this is my post about planning; the first time I tried to write a novel, I failed miserably because I hadn't planned enough. I advise having an idea of what happens in every single chapter before you even think about writing. Of course, some people work just as well beginning with no plan at all, but if you're new to this (I'm hardly an expert) then I'd recommend some serious planning.
• If the story stems from one image, unpack it slowly. Sometimes ideas come from nowhere almost fully formed, but I often imagine a single image or scene, which is my starting point. With Courage to Live, the image of a teenage girl and a girl of about five meeting in a hospital was what I based everything on when, in the end, I didn't use that scene. The main thing was to figure out who these characters were, why they were linked, and how they ended up in the hospital.
• Know how long the story will be. You don't have to decide that your story will be 80,000 words before you start, of course. It is, however, a good idea to know whether you want to write a short story, a novella, a novel, a trilogy, etc. I usually define a short story as less than 7,500 words, a novella as 7,500-50,000 words, and a novel as over 50,000. I've been told that a debut novel should not exceed 100,000 words, but it does depend on the genre. 

The course asks you to think about where you write best (a room in your house, the library, a cafe?)  and when (in the morning, during a free twenty minutes, or at night?). A small section of the first block focuses on the importance of names, which I'll write another blog post about.

I'm back!

When I left you in November, it was because I was busy completely NaNoWriMo. In the first three days of November, I easily wrote 2500 words a day, and so I decided to continue with this target throughout the month. I managed it, leaving me with 75,000 words of a novel, but it was exhausting and time consuming and I just didn't have the time or motivation to blog.

After that, I had my January exams to revise for.

And somewhere along the way I forgot about this blog. For that, I apologise; I spent about an hour finding it again, though, and now I'm back.

This year so far, I've done the vast majority of a twelve week creative writing course for the Open University. I'll write another post summarising each of the five blocks and I might post my first assessment piece. The second (and final) assessment is due in for the 27th, and at the moment it's a work in progress.

Yesterday, I finished the first draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, which is temporarily named Courage To Live. It ended up being just over 90,000 words so, seeing as I wrote 9000 words beforehand, it's taken me four and a half months to write about 6000 words. Hmm. The wonderful thing is that, once my next lot of exams are over, I can finally edit this novel into something worth reading. I'm proud of myself for completing just the draft, because it means I cared enough to finish it, albeit slowly, which I didn't do with my novel of 2010 (because it was a pile of horse crap).

Expect a few posts about my Open University course, updates on my editing of Courage To Live, some random facts about grammar and language, and then in August possible silence as I once again attempt to complete NaNoWriMo - but in the summer!

Lex :)