The first Camp NaNoWriMo session of 2017 is over, and I completed the challenge with 30 hours (1803 minutes).
This year I went with something completely different, even considering my past unusual projects for Camp. Planning, an unusual adventure to take considering I’m usually a pantser when it comes to writing. I discussed the reasoning behind my Camp project in a previous post, and all that reasoning still stands.
So how’d my planning turn out? I got a lot of planning and research and character development done during Camp NaNo, but none of these plans are complete. The Anxiety Girl novel still has a huge blank for the middle of the book because I decided to kill one character before the story starts (the main character’s grandmother, who died during the story in the first and second drafts) and decrease the role of another (the main character’s father). One major problem with this novel is that my main character isn’t well-formed enough for me to figure out what she really wants. She’s undecided about almost everything, doesn’t know what she wants in life, and is generally a passive person. This makes for a boring character and a boring book, something I’m still working to solve.
The other big project I did planning and research for is my parallel worlds novel that I’ve been dabbling in since 2010. I’ve been putting off the research and planning ever since finishing the second draft due to complications in figuring out parallel worlds and photography and the overall plot. But at some point I was just putting these things off with no good reason, so Camp NaNo gave me a chance to dig into this novel and figure out more of the science and story behind these parallel worlds.
Completing Camp NaNoWriMo with planning and tracking by hours was difficult in its own right. One thing I learned quickly was that sure, I can write 5,000 words in an hour if I’m pressed for time, but I can’t do an hour’s worth of work in 30 minutes. My goal averaged out to an hour a day over the course of the month, which I kept up with for the first week. But as the month went on, I fell behind. I was busy, I didn’t want to sit in front of a computer screen and think through a full hour of plotting and research, and sometimes those ideas just wouldn’t come. Sometimes I’d poke at character traits or plotlines and have no idea what to do with them. Other times I’d find myself switching between projects, trying to find some kind of plot hole I could fill in or some setting quirk to add. Falling behind meant playing catchup in the last week, often to the tune of planning for several hours at once over the last weekend.
But I did it, I won, and those novels are a lot closer to the third draft. Overall, I’m glad I embraced planning and research for Camp NaNo. I’m trying to keep the momentum going for as long as possible, although not necessarily at the rate I was working at during camp. That’s the only way these books will get written, after all.