NaNoWriMo 2017:

[capri0mni]

[Image description: NaNoWriMo 2017 Winner's badge: square, bright yellow with main text in white, and a central motif of a "Superhero shield" in black, with a large white "W" in the center. Description ends]

It turns out the real novel is the backstory you figure out along the way (in week three).

My initial plot bunny for this story was that a boy stumbles upon a Baba Yaga style house (but it's crow-legged, instead of chicken-legged), only... it's alone. It's lost its person. And it follows the boy home, and recruits the boy's help to try and rescue said person.

And it was ... going okay-ish. Until house and boy were underway, and I had to figure out exactly Who house's person was, and how person was connected to the giantess troll, who was the next person the house goes to for help, and the boy has to deal with...

So I said to myself: okay, I'll just write a quick backstory, and tack it onto the front of this document (so the backstory's word count is part of my NaNoWriMo's total), and go on from there... I just write it in "fairy Tale" style -- bare bones, almost, so it won't take too long.

18,383 words later (!), it turns out this is the complete story, with a beginning, middle, another middle, a third middle, and an end that has enough to it to stand on its own.

I crossed the 50K word mark on Monday (including all the words and false starts in my original story idea), but I wanted to keep going so that I could earn the "update your story for 30 days in a row" badge, which I'd never done. I wanted to beat my previous word count record, which happens to have been on a story I was trying too tell over, so not fully in the NaNo spirit. And I also wanted to get to my version of the "happy ever after ending."

(Which I did at about 3 this afternoon)

Back to public reality tomorrow... *blah*

Comments

[maramcreates]

Congratulations!!

[capri0mni]

Thank you!

[davidgillon]

Congrats!

Backstory can be fascinating. Rewriting my novel just threw out a literal Heart of Darkness, With Added Zombies. I may have to write that story properly at some point.

[capri0mni]

Exciting! ... Both your plot sketch, and your discovery of the same.

[pedanther]

It turns out the real novel is the backstory you figure out along the way

This is said to be how Lev Tolstoy came to write "War and Peace". He set out to write a novel about the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, but found that to do the job properly he needed to learn more about the previous generation that lived through the War of 1812. The background research turned into one of the longest novels in modern literature, and the novel about the Decembrists was abandoned after three chapters.

[capri0mni]

^_^ Great thing about studying literature as a writer: you learn about how much your fellow writers have in common with you, no matter where or when they live/d.

I imagine it's the same for carpenters and bakers, and gardeners. Some things just work they way they work because of the nature of the beast.

[meridian_rose]

Congratulations! :D *confetti*

[capri0mni]

Thank you! *Toots party blower*

[pebblerocker]

Wonderful! Congratulations on winning, and yay for finding the story in your original story!

[capri0mni]

Thank you!

And even though I only ordered it on the 28th, and it was supposedly on preorder, my 2017 Winner's Shirt arrived today!

[igenlode]

Impressive!
(NaNoWriMo is one thing I'm never going to try... but I love writing stories that are backstories...)

[capri0mni]

Thanks!

So far, I've never used NaNoWriMo as a tool for creating a finished story, but rather, as a psychological space to delve into unexplored regions of my imagination: A story idea that I don't think about (usually) during any of the other 11 months of the year. And having a hard start date and a hard end date means I'm less likely to fall into an intrusive thought spiral with it.

(also, at least when I'm with nerds, I can use it as an excuse to escape mind-numbing social interaction: "I've enjoyed our chat, but you'll have to excuse me, I've got another 800 words I want to write, today: NaNoWriMo, you know."

(Although this year, I may actually go back and polish that backstory)

[igenlode]

Hah, yes -- almost as good as "sorry, I can't do the washing-up, I've got to get in some singing practice before it gets late enough for the neighbours to complain" :-D

[capri0mni]

Hee!