T-minus ten days and counting until Nov. 1st (which reminds me–buy birthday card for Mom!) I don’t think I’ve ever spent this amount of time outlining something before I just gave up and started writing it in my life. Well, maybe back in my teen years when I had this urge to write and nothing to say. Back then, all I did was outline until I got bored with whatever my story idea was (because there was no passion behind it) and tucked the half-finished outline in a bottom drawer.

Actually, like scrollgirl, I am writing a little bit of text of my NaNo “novel.” OK, probably a lot of text, but I’m not counting words, and it’s mostly scribblings of dialogue. Dialogue is always what I write in the “first pass” through the text of my new episodes. It serves as a kind of “skeleton” of a scripted scene and therefore is “practically part of the outline anyway.”

What I’ve figured out so far as a result of this outlining:

NaNo notes

I just thought I’d get all my NaNo bitching done *before* NaNo starts, heh.

Question 1: How do you do a word count if the text of your story is scattered around in a million little files on your hard drive, *and* intermixed with your outline in any particular file, which doesn’t itself contribute to the actual word count? I mean, I guess you could just count the outline as well, but if you then erase or move the outline, your word count goes down because it was artificially inflated in the first place.

Question 2: How do you do a word count if you’re like me, and you have five versions of the same sentence all in a row because you haven’t decided which version you like best yet?

Do I really have such a different writing process than the rest of the human race, or is any of this making sense?

A few of my writer friends are doing NaNoWriMo this year. Which I have to admit, I’ve never really been tempted by. Write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I know that if I decided to start a novel, that within one month, I might *reasonably* come up with a premise, and maybe even write 50,000 words. But those words would be be scattered scenes, most of them experimental in nature, and scattered, isolated lines (probably of dialogue), plus some background notes as I brainstorm on characters and plot ideas.

But a complete rough draft of a novel?

My initial writing of a story is always open-ended, and subject to later (possibly enormous) revision–what’s the use of keeping a little ticky-counter that rises as you approach 50,000 words if half of them end up in the round file later? Consigning words to the round file (or the back files of your hard drive–I never throw anything away) is part of the writing process. Success can’t be counted–for me, personally– by the number of words I have (unless I can’t get past one page, in which case, why would I attempt NaNo in the first place).

Anyone who can belt out 50,000 words of a rough draft in one month will probably spend the next year completely changing everything they wrote in that month. Which I suppose gives structure to the novel-writing task. But isn’t the same thing as actually “writing a novel” in a month. It’s the flower bud of a novel.

eta: above post edited to make clear my NaNo comments only apply to me, not anyone else, and certainly were not meant to belittle participants. Different things work for different people.