As the month of NaNo has ended, I thought I’d do a little review post about my writing experience for those thirty days. For this blog, I’m going to be answering a group of questions from Paper Fury’s ‘Beautiful People’ tag! The complete list of questions will be at the very end of the blog.
Let’s begin!
- On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best), how did the book turn out? Did anything defy your expectations?
In terms of writing 50000 words, my novel went great. In terms of those being good words, my novel went horribly. I know that people say the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to just write something, but the content of that first draft just makes me want to never write again.
- Comparative title time: what published books, movies, or TV shows are like your book? (Ex: Inkheart meets X-Men.)
I was thinking about this a lot while writing and came up with a little list of some books that I think are similar to Heart in terms of style and some of the themes that the story explores:
- Holding Up The Universe by Jennifer Niven
- Undone by Cat Clarke
- Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
- Our Chemical Hearts by Krystal Sutherland
- Do you enjoy working with deadlines and pressure (aka NaNoWriMo)? Or do you prefer to write-as-you’re-inspired?
I love deadlines until it comes to writing. I work great under pressure until it comes to writing. I love these things because they give structure to my life, but they just don’t work at all with writing.
- How do you go about editing? Give us an insight into your editing process.
As soon as the first draft is complete, I’ll pull up the document and put it on one side of my screen and put a blank document on the other. I like to basically rewrite the entire novel as a starting point: it helps me remember what actually happened in the story and it’s easy for me to pick out things that work and things that don’t. As I rewrite, I’ll take notes about small things like character appearances and ages (and anything else in the story that needs to remain consistent!) and fix them if they suddenly change. After rewriting the first time, I’ll go back to fix individual scenes or rearrange sections, then I’ll go and rewrite the entire thing again.
- What aspect of your story needs the most work?
I think the entire structure needs work. I wrote this draft a lot faster than I usually write so it’s extremely messy. Subplots disappear halfway through. There is a huge amount of plot holes. The characters seem to time travel at points because I forgot to keep track of when things happened.
- What aspect of your story did you love the most?
Ryn and Asher’s friendship and how it develops, and I love them more than any other friendship I’ve written. At first, I thought it would be easy to push a romance between them, but I think I like the idea of a romance-free book as there seems to be a lack of true and genuine friendship in contemporary YA fiction.
- Give us a brief run down on your main characters and how you think they turned out. Do you think they’ll need changes in edits?
Ryn is morbidly pessimistic, blaming the world for his problems. He would probably see past the anger if he could still… well, see. Asher sees the good in everyone, probably best since she blocks out what mean things everyone says about her. Not by choice, but she does it. I’m currently very happy with the characters and how they developed throughout the novel, but I think their individual storylines and subplots (those ones that disappeared halfway through the draft) need resurrecting and improving.
- What are your plans for this novel once you finish editing? More edits? Finding beta readers? Querying? Self-publishing? Hiding it in a dark hole forever?
Hiding in a dark hole forever sounds extremely tempting, but I think I’m leaning towards a publishing route. As much as I’d love this to be my first traditionally published book, I think the process of acquiring an agent and querying would take a while (if it does happen) and I’m too desperate to put this story out into the world, so I think it’s likely that I’ll be trying to self-publish as soon as editing is complete.
- What are your writing goals and plans for 2019?
Edit. Edit. Edit. I’d love to be able to self-publish Heart at some point in 2019, maybe around the time when the story is set, but I’m so in love with the story that my perfectionist tendencies will take over and I’ll spend months making sure that every detail is perfect before anyone can read it.
I’ve just remembered that I made a video and a blog about this question at the end of last year and I’m pretty sure that I haven’t achieved any of my goals.
In the comments below, let me know how your month of writing went!
Complete list of questions:
- On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best), how did the book turn out? Did anything defy your expectations?
2. Comparative title time: what published books, movies, or TV shows are like your book? (Ex: Inkheart meets X-Men.)
3. Do you enjoy working with deadlines and pressure (aka NaNoWriMo)? Or do you prefer to write-as-you’re-inspired?
4. How do you go about editing? Give us an insight into your editing process.
5. What aspect of your story needs the most work?
6. What aspect of your story did you love the most?
7. Give us a brief run down on your main characters and how you think they turned out. Do you think they’ll need changes in edits?
8. What are your plans for this novel once you finish editing? More edits? Finding beta readers? Querying? Self-publishing? Hiding it in a dark hole forever?
9. Share a favourite snippet!
10. What are your writing goals and plans for 2016?
TandeWrites 