What I learned from NaNoWriMo

My #Fridayflash for the week is in a state that I don't like at the moment, so I'm going to see if I can fix it for next week. In it's place I thought I would muse about some of the things I learned while participating in this year's National Novel Writing Month.

First, I will say that I did not 'win.' I only managed about 30k words, foolishly thinking that when I visited my parents I would find a way to make enough time to get a good word count each day. Instead I ended up with 150 words for the whole 5 day visit. So lesson one would be that I'm not good at writing on the road.

But on a more positive aspect, I did find that NaNoWriMo is actually a pretty good exercise in getting your butt in the chair and writing. It helped me I think to really develop some good habits about sitting down to my keyboard when I get home from work and at least getting something down on the page. Now if I can keep that up, I'm going to be quite happy with myself. I mean, sure I didn't get all 50k words, but just 500 words a day gets you 3 novels each year. And for me, that only takes about 15min to half an hour.

Which brings me to my second point. I took a fair amount of time in October going over my novel's structure so that I had a solid plot, with solid characters, solid goals, and solid well everything. So when it came down to doing the actual writing, I got to pour words out of my head and into the story without having to worry about what was coming next, because the little note card on Scrivener told me what was coming next. I had never written anything with that solid a structure before, and let me tell you that it was a joy. Plus, with a detailed outline, I was able to go through it and revise it a couple times to make sure that the story as a whole worked without having to cut out entire scenes and chapters, rewriting them all over again. Instead it was cutting out a sentence here and there. Outlining rocks.

And finally, I used Scrivener to write my NaNoWriMo novel, which was pretty cool. I learned a lot about it and will be purchasing the full version when my trial eventually runs out. It has a lot of neat tools that let me organize the story better then when I just used my own note cards for instance. I liked having everything in one place and so easy to change. So for the $40 or whatever it's going to cost me (Windows version, not sure about the Mac one quite yet) I think it's quite worth it.

I may not have gotten to 50k words, but I think I won in my own little way.

Excerpt from "An Echo Remains"

I have not written a piece of flash this Friday as I'm slightly behind on my NaNoWriMo project. Anyways, I decided to post a quick scene from my NaNoWriMo project, "An Echo Remains" for your enjoyment (hopefully.)





The gray brick building sat in the middle of an old industrial park, surrounded by rusted barbed wire fencing. Old grain towers next to the rail yard loomed overhead, covered in graffiti up to the point where humans with spray paint could reach. Thom stepped out of Mark’s car and said. “Looks about like what I expected.”

“What do you mean?”

“For some reason I figured it would be in some abandoned industrial park with all kinds of rusted crap all over.”

Mark glanced over his shoulders at the grain towers. “You know they still use those right? Just because something’s been tagged a couple times and all the metal work isn’t freshly painted, doesn’t mean it’s abandoned.”

“I suppose.” Thom reached into the car and fetched his notebook and pen. “Shall we?”

Inside, the building was no less impressive. The oak-like laminated front desk showed its years in the fading of its color and many chips. Behind it, a woman sharply descending into her early 50s sat at a computer. She looked up from the screen and said, “You here to see Leonard?” Mark nodded. “Have a seat and I’ll let him know you’re here.”

Mark remained standing as the couple ripped leather chairs didn’t succeed in luring him in. The walls were painted a faded yellow and there were no framed gold records on the wall like he had imagined. A couple old newspapers sat on a small end-table. Him and Thom traded glances for a moment until Leonard emerged from the back.

“Hey guys.” said the large, balding man wearing a wrinkled polo shirt. “So I hear you’re looking to record your first record. Well, I think you’ve come to the right place.”

He motioned for them to follow him into the back. Mark and Thom hesitated for a moment before reluctantly . Lingering behind Leonard, Thom whispered into Mark’s ear, “I have a bad feeling we’re about to be taken into a basement, tortured, and never seen again.”

“You’ve been watching too many horror movies.”

“Still, this shit’s creepy. I don’t care how good they are. I couldn’t play well in this place. My anxiety is already spiked.”

They caught up to Leonard who stopped at their mixing board. It was slightly older looking than the other ones they saw that morning, but at least it didn’t look as dated as the waiting room. Through the glass, a moderately sized recording space was filled with guitars and amps for some band that must have been taking a break.

“So this is it. We’ve got this space, a big drum room with a twenty foot ceiling, and an isolation room. The acoustics we have here can’t be beat. Now, we may not have every bell and whistle that you may have seen downtown, but all our equipment is top notch, plus I’ve been doing this since the early 70s. And one thing I have learned in that time, is that having a good, experience engineer is the most important thing you can do to make sure your sound is solid.

“Our mastering engineer Teddy isn’t here either, but he’s been doing this with me for just as long, and he’s just as good. I know when you see our hourly prices are a bit steep, but me and Teddy, believe me, we’re worth it.”

He sat down on his chair at the console and clicked a couple buttons. “All I ask is that you listen to the last thing Teddy and I finished from a local metal band. Now, I know it’s not your style exactly, but I always want to show guys like you our latest stuff so you know just what we will typically do.”

The studio monitors came alive with the crunch of the heavily distorted guitars and pounding drums. But the sound was solid and full. After the opening bars of the song, the singer came screaming in with such ferocity that the hairs on Mark’s arm stood on end.

After the song finished, Leonard turned around and explained what they had done with that particular band to get their sound, the microphones they used, the signal processing they did to extract every bit of crunch that they could out of their guitars.

“So now what can I do for you guys?” said Leonard, before answering his own question. “I’ve got a selection of high quality microphones that goes back since I started this business that can give you just about every imaginable sound you want. And if you don’t like what your amps or even guitars are doing, I’ve got my own equipment that, again can allow us to do whatever you want. Do you have any questions?”

Mark scooted forward in his chair. “I’m going to state the obvious here. Your location and waiting room don’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in me that you guys are very successful. So why should we put this much trust in you?”

“Wow, you’re direct. To answer that, Studios that pander to your creature comforts over sound quality disgust me. I’m all about sound here, not fancy leather couches and cappuccino machines.”

Thom asked a couple more questions about the amps and microphones he had, plus some of the processing effects. Mark got a list of references and a couple high-profile bands that he had worked with and they left after about an hour.

Back in the car, Mark threw his head back on the headrest and said, “So, what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t know if I’d be comfortable there, and their rates, holy shit. I don’t drink it, but for that price I would want access to a fucking cappuccino machine.”