The end of NaNoWriMo is in sight: fourteen chapters and 47,500 words done. I was originally aiming for seventeen chapters due to some kind of theme that I was running with, but I've got a point and I really don't know how I would fill three more chapters (or at least fill them with the sense of pace that I think I need), and so I have decided, "Oh well, this is what rewriting is for, if I ever decide to rewrite it," and so I have two chapters left to do.
I'm hoping that I will get the penultimate chapter written tonight, and then the last chapter done tomorrow - if I do, as a reward for myself I'm going to go and see Blade Runner: The Final Cut at FACT on Wednesday night.
This will be my second year of real NaNoWriMo success, as it will be the second time I have reached the fifty thousand word mark and completed the story. I don't know if I have really learned anything new in the process. In some ways I like last year's novel better than this year's, it felt like something really personal and like something I needed to get out of me last year, whereas this year it was more to show myself that last year wasn't a fluke.
Last year I was completely focused on writing my story about the relationship between Billy (a regular guy) and Erin (a dream), and what happened when Erin left the universe of dreams to escape from Lord Malice, the Prince of Nightmares. Even though at the start I had no idea of the ending, I was totally hooked on writing the story, and knew that it would all tie together.
This year, I kind of had some ideas in place, but all along I have had to fight off other ideas for other stories that have been coming in (most involve a story/novel whose front cover would be like a poster for a band, with the tagline "Post-Apocalypse. Post-Human. Post-Punk." I don't know what it means, but it means something); one NaNoWriMo school of thought is that you should just include everything no matter what, but as rough as my novel might be I want it to make some kind of sense...
Still. Almost done. What next? I've thought about doing 24 Hour Comic Day at some point, and I was too busy to do Script Frenzy! this year, but who knows, maybe next year... We could start our own writing/creative challenge...
Anyone fancy writing a thousand haiku in December?
Monday, 26 November 2007
Last Days
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5 comments:
Damn, 1000?
Maybe 100, but not 1000
It's only thirty a day or so... How will other people respect/roll their eyes (delete as applicable) at us if we don't aim high?
But see....if I write 30 haikus a day, I'm going to write bad haikus simply for the sake of completely the task. Personally, I don't care that idea. I think that in a month's time I could craft 100 at least decent haikus; a whole thousand, to me, seems unreasonable unless you're ok with lesser quality.
On reflection, I know what you mean. 30 haiku doesn't equate to the same sort of word count that you would find a challenge like NaNoWriMo, and yet that seems (in some sense) like an OK target. And haiku have quite a simple form.
I wonder what the qualitative difference is between noveling and haiku writing?
The qualitative measure, I think, is vastly different.
Both novels and haikus are capable of artistic beauty, that's no question, but a haiku captures a singular moment of beauty in a very, very short pace. The novel has room to stretch its legs, so to speak, and let several moments of beauty pass through its periphery.
The haiku thus has more quality per unit "volume" (line, word, syllable, phoneme, etc.)
That's my take
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