National Novel Writing Month - Three Weeks In.



I have been too busy writing to blog lately. I am currently doing National Novel Writing Month. The aim is to write 50,000 words for the month. As of a few moments ago I have written 1826 words for the day, which betters the daily target of 1667 words. My best daily total is 2430 words. All up I have written 37345 words, so I am currently 2345 words ahead of schedule. But I need to get further ahead as next week I have a few days where my writing time is reduced, and I won’t be writing at all on Saturday week because of an all day and late into the night job as a polling assistant.

I am very much enjoying the science fiction young adult story I am writing. The novel can easily be divided into five parts, and I am just at the end of part two, which suggests it will be about 90,000 words. A bit shorter than my other drafts of novels.

I do worry about a few things though. Do I have too much dialogue? Recently I have begun to include short past tense (the novel is written in present tense) summaries of what the four main characters said and decided to do.

I also worry about the amount of swearing I have included. When I was a kid we swore out heads off, but I have a feeling I will be cutting down on the swearing when I edit it.

Another worry comes from the novel being in first person and from the one character’s POV. Everything is described from an 18-year-old’s limited knowledge of the world and the people in it. So sometimes his descriptions and conclusions are dead wrong. I worry readers might say that is wrong, and think the author should have checked his facts, rather than the reader knowing that it is just the character who is wrong.

The last point makes the writing easier in some ways because I don’t have to fact check everything my character says. If he thinks the moon might be bigger in the northern hemisphere, then that is what he thinks. I don’t need to bother to check whether he is right.

Anyway, I must get back to writing and see if I can beat my best daily total so far.

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