Where’s an Epic Fail badge when you need it? No really, I failed at NaNoWriMo this year. It was my first year trying and I’m used to writing in my own timelines. I generally tend to veer off course and end up somewhere in the middle of a quiet field standing on the edge of a desert wondering how I got this far off track.
I made a fatal error approximately halfway through the month of November when I introduced a character that managed to write her way into my story. I know the logical advice would have been to just not write her in, but any writer knows that you don’t get to decide who is in your story. Characters will always find their way in, situations will arise that you hadn’t initially thought would happen. Your story outline for the most part is just a guideline. I tried my best to stick to that guideline, however, this character was so important to the story that I had to go back to the beginning to introduce her and explain why she was important to begin with. However it destroyed the entire 6,000 words I’d written for the beginning and made them entirely moot. I found myself facing 3,000 words instead of the 12,000-13,000 that I had hoped to be at by the end of that day.
Normally I would agree that I should have pressed on, but I’d lost the entire story I had and nothing I could have done could have salvaged it for this year. I didn’t want to end up with a pitiful excuse of a book. It’s nice to say that NaNoWriMo has no rules; just that you have to write until you hit 50,000 words, but I have my standards and I didn’t want to reach the end with a bunch of gibberish. So sadly this story is being redefined and I’ll start over from the beginning in next year’s competition.
On the plus side, there’s another competition this year and it’s called Script Frenzy. Script is actually my preferred way of writing. It requires a lack of description and thrives mainly on the dialogue with bits of description in between. After all, you’re only giving lines to the actors and giving an idea to the director, not telling him/her how to do their job. It’s up to them to make it look great; they just need a good basis.
Anyways! So here’s the challenge.
During the month of April!
100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days.
You may write the following types of scripts:
- Screenplays
- Stage plays
- TV shows
- Short films
- Graphic novels
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