NaNoWriMo Week 1
What’s up y’all. Check in time.
Who else out there is participating in NaNoWriMo 2020? This is my first time actually working toward 50,000 words by the end of the month and man, it’s a fucking trip. Partially because I am a screenwriter, not a novel writer. But I suppose that’s because I’ve never tried. Who knows what can open up when we don’t box ourselves in to one practice.
It’s also been an interesting trip to actually sit down and focus on word count. I’ve never thought about word count when writing scripts. I hit 10,000 words two days ago and that would have been a whole screenplay had I been working on a screenplay.
This is the craziness. I would never imagine writing a screenplay in seven days. It’s never been a possibility in my mind, but now I realize that I may have been holding myself back by my insecurities and perceived roadblocks. That’s not to say I would have a good script in a week, but I’m not going to have a good novel in a month! I’ll have the finished first draft of something that, if I think it’s worth the work, I can chip away at and edit into a maybe good novel. It’s never a foregone conclusion that anything we write will be good, whether we spend a week, month or year on it. But the truth remains, anything we write is better than writing nothing at all.
The concept that I’m writing for NaNoWriMo was originally conceived as a script, and I’m working off a Save the Cat beat sheet that I wrote for the screenplay idea about a year ago. This is a factor that I consider a strength in my transition into this longer form of writing. Basically everything I’ve learned from years of screenwriting can be applied to this novel. There are obvious differences, but writing tight action and believable dialogue translates through any type of storytelling.
It’s only the first week, and I sure hope I can keep my own attention long enough to finish this month out with a completed first draft of this exciting idea. But it’s in my hands, and I have no excuses because, while I am busy with other exciting freelance projects and doing the billionth edit on my most recent screenplay, I do spend every damn day at home and there are a lot of damn hours in the day. No excuses. And now I know that I can write 1,650 words a day which, if I apply that warp speed to a screenplay, I can be a prolific and more spontaneous writer. This is a good thing. As long as I’m extra diligent when it comes to the editing process. Ugh.