NANOWRIMO and Iterative Writing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’m pushing the explanation of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group blog hop to the bottom and get right into the blog entry for this month.

This month’s question is asking me if I have done the National Novel Writing Month. I have participated in NANOWRIMO at least twice before this year and I’ve got one day’s worth of writing in this year. I made it to 50,000 words two years ago but I doubt any of those paragraphs will ever make it into a novel. I’m still working with the characters and the setting but it’s almost totally a different story. Even if I make it to 50K words this year I won’t count it as a genuine win because it’s not a completely new novel idea. There’s still scenes similar to the last time I tried to make something of this idea. I don’t remember how far I got toward 50K words the other time I attempted NANOWRIMO. 

The other topic I thought I’d throw in here this month is about critique groups and iterative writing.

Here’s the dilemma. There are many rules, suggestions, and principles to  follow in writing. 

In each iteration of writing I can hit the target for the first time regarding one of the rules/suggestions/principles and/or improve how well I hit the target for a rule/suggestion/principle I’ve already followed to one degree or other. 

The problem is I need to communicate to critique partners where I am in this iterative process. 

When people find out you are writing they expect a Stephen King style of start at the beginning and proceed to the end, coming up with interesting characters, putting them in a situation and moving them through the character arcs, the beats, and all of it.

I’m finding I need to start just somewhere, write something, and know in the writing I will be coming back to attempt to make the scene or whatever conform better to the ways good fiction needs to be written.

I read somewhere something about Sinclair Lewis having a surprising amount of background information about characters and such which only made it into Main Street, you might say, subconsciously. I think I’m approaching my writing a bit in that way.

I’ve got a two-page or so discussion between a low order evil spirit and his “boss”, a bit like Screw Tape Letters. They are discussing the strategy behind instigating somehow the protagonist’s wine bar catching fire. I was going to leave this just to inspire the way I thought about the story but I might bring it to the surface because I so enjoy Christian supernatural thrillers like the kind you might associate with Frank Peretti and James L. Rubart.  It makes it a form of speculative fiction to pull back the veil and show what’s happening behind the circumstances, from where promptings toward evil are coming.

Now to explain a bit of what this blog hop and the Insecure Writer’s Support Group is about. 

The first Wednesday of each month, the Insecure Writers Support Group hosts a blog hop. A blog hop is accomplished through internet magic where links to our blogs end up congregated on one page. Each month a question or questions are generated to stimulate bloggers’ thoughts about the insecurities of writing. We bloggers can choose to answer the question(s) of the month or discuss other insecurities of writing.

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