VIN WINS THE NANO

Yesterday night I crossed the 50,000-words mark which officially makes me a winner in the National Novel Writing Month thing. However, I am yet to finish the story but I still have another week to do it. It was an incredible experience writing the novel that was lurking in my mind for the better part of a decade. At last I’ve got it down somewhere! Right now I feel a considerable lightness of the mental kind. It wasn’t fun writing it though. I had a hard time herding the multitude of ideas screaming to be let out. More difficult was the actual writing hammering out at least two thousand words a day. But it had its own moments of fun. At a few places, here and there I was surprised at some of the lines that came spontaneously.

I suggest that entering into such a contest should be mandatory for all writers. It reveals a lot about the self. You will know your limits and how far you can stretch them. Yesterday morning I had thought of writing 5000 words in a single day. My previous high was 4500 words in a day that I wrote sometime last week and I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t easy though but it wasn’t impossible. When I crossed the 5000 words mark I felt pleased with my own determination which is non-existent on most days. A little bit of my self-confidence has grown and I hope to do the rewriting, revising on the book in the coming days.

The surprising part was that I decided to write this novel though I was at work on my first book which I had begun two years back. I was working on it on and off but sometime during June of this year I decided that I must finish the book this year come what may. I will be turning forty five next Feb and I wanted to finish a book at any cost. With the NaNo book I now have two books under my belt. That feels great.

The books I have written may not get published and right now I am not even thinking of sending them to publishers. They need a lot of work and that would keep me busy for another year at least. This will be a great learning experience and I hope to learn many new things about writing, myself and life while rewriting and revising my books. In future posts I will write more about my books. For now, that is all I have to say

Halfway Through My NaNo Novel

Today, I sailed past the halfway mark of the 50,000 words of my NaNo novel. I wrote 25,006 words so far. I am pleased no end with my progress because I have only another 25,000 words to hammer out in the next fifteen days though at the rate at which the book is moving my word count is likely to be around 60,000 words. Now that I’ve managed to cross 25,000 words I am confident I can do it.

It has been a crazy month so far with the mind focused on only the writing of the novel and the day’s word count. On some days I was able to write two thousand words (the limit I set myself for each day) and on a few days I was not able to write even five hundred words. One day I managed to write 4500 words though I had actually planned to write five thousand words that day. In the next fifteen days I plan to write five thousand words on some day.

But writing the NaNo novel has been a learning experience. It is certainly insane to attempt to write a novel in thirty days but I feel there are advantages to this method. First, you get the novel down from your mind to paper (or screen). Then next, you begin to think of actually finishing it. If you persist then you can finish the novel and I am determined to finish it come what may.

Writing the novel, I am feeling some of the lessons on writing I read about, begin to sink in. The basic rule is to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Then the other rules about having characters, dialogue, etc are also beginning to sink in. But what has permeated more deeply is the advice I read somewhere that a writer should think of his book in terms of scenes. Writing my NaNo novel I am trying to follow this advice and am actually thinking of the next scene and how many words it will take to write it. I hope to actually practice all the bits of advice that I’ve read so far.

What is helping me is that my novel is a satirical magic realism novel in which I am able to write literally anything that comes to my mind. Much of it is pure drivel and utter nonsense but I feel that once I finish it, it will begin to make sense (at least to me!). I cannot say I am having fun writing the book since it is making me edgy and impatient to finish it as soon as possible. But it is one wonderful learning experience that I hope to repeat every year from now onwards.

Writing My NaNoWriMo Novel

I had registered for the National Novel Writing Month Organisation few days ago. I have to write a novel of fifty thousand words before November 30. It sounds daunting and makes me wonder if it is any way of writing a novel. But I had been planning and thinking of writing a book since ten years and never got down to writing one seriously. I think this is the perfect opportunity to get the novel down.

Ten years ago I had done a course in Creative Writing in English from the Indira Gandhi Open University but I had not submitted my proposed project- a novel. I attended the classes for several months, met a few friends there with whom I am in touch even today but did not find the time to complete the project. Doing the course did some wonders to my writing ambitions first of which was that my first article, which was actually an assignment, was published in a newspaper as a middle. Incidentally, my first article was on fountain pens.


The project I had proposed to do was a fantasy novel and I had made some chapter outlines and had a general idea of the story. In the next month I plan to write this story. If I complete the novel then it would be a major achievement in my life. When I was young I told a friend that one day I would write a book. I was ten or twelve then and had absolutely no idea of writing much less about writing a book. I also do not know why I made that statement. But that promise stayed in my mind all these years. Now that I have a general idea of how to write a book (which I learnt from reading books on writing) I hope I would be able to achieve that childhood dream.