I have participated (and won) National Novel Writing Month for six years now which means (theoretically) that I have six 50,000 word novels sitting on my desktop.
It has only been the past two years where I have successfully written 50,000 words in one month that also included a beginning, middle, and end of a novel-- my other ventures never made it much more than to the muddling middle of a story.
That feeling, of writing the cliche words the end is addicting and it is a goal that felt impossible those first years of novel writing, an impossible reach...until I did it.My goal for my first stay at Camp NaNo feels similarly impossible. Camp NaNo is like the younger sibling of NaNoWriMo-- a self-directed month with a self-directed fill-in-the-blank writing goal.
My goal for this month? To edit a novel.
You see I have never edited...well, really anything I have ever written (except blog posts of course!). My novels are all dust-covered first drafts with the faults, flaws, missteps, and fourth wall breaking you would expect from a dash-to-the-finish-line competition such as NaNo.
The novel I am going to edit is called Among the Stars (at least that is what it's called until I can come up with something better) and it is a sci-fic novel I wrote for NaNo '16. I have broken it up into 19 scenes (I plotted out this novel by scenes and that is one of the large reasons I was able to write a beginning, middle, and end because before the first word was penned I had a clear goal in mind).
19 scenes. 4 weeks. Because Camp NaNo doesn't allow you to declare number of scenes edited as a goal, I've set up an hour goal. And because Camp NaNo is hardcore, the smallest hour goal you can set is 30 hours (though to be honest my real goal is 20 hours).
That means for about an hour every day I want to sit down and edit a scene or two, work on some plot points, and basically make my characters fully fleshed out.
And since this month begins with a holiday, I'm technically already behind-- but unlike NaNoWriMo, I'm not super dedicated to reaching my goal. Instead I just want to make progress, to try my hand at editing, polishing, crafting a story, coaxing it from the rubble that is a first draft.
Wish me luck! ((because man do I need it))
What about you? Have you ever edited something you have written? Any tips for me?
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