In my last post, I talked about how I researched different writing techniques in my quest to improve the first draft of my current work-in-progress, The Magical Vessel (TMV), following the 2017 Camp NaNoWriMo sessions.
Now, as promised, I’m going to tell you about the April 2018 Camp NaNoWriMo session, wherein I began to apply what I’d learned to the second draft of TMV Part 1. Spoiler alert: I had a pretty rough session!
Preparing For the Event
I got off on the wrong start with April’s Camp NaNoWriMo session before the session even started.
Things were going well when March 2018 first rolled around. I was still tweaking my story materials for the upcoming session, filling in my character chart and finalizing my revised timeline. I was proud of myself for being so productive.
Then I was pleasantly sidetracked.
About a week into the month, I found out about the InstaWriMo challenge. The NaNoWriMo folks provided a list of prompts for every day of March, such as “Writing Inspiration” (Day 1) and “Something Green” (Day 17). Participants were supposed to post a photo on Instagram that satisfied the prompt(s). The idea was for us to get pumped about Camp NaNoWriMo.
It sounded like fun. I had already been thinking about starting an Instagram account for one of my New Year’s Resolutions. InstaWriMo seemed like the perfect way to kick the tires on a new platform. I signed up for an account and jumped in.
In hindsight, I pushed myself too hard with InstaWriMo. I don’t regret participating, but I should have taken it easy. I expended so much energy learning how to use Instagram, thinking about the prompts, and arranging the photos that I didn’t finish my character chart or timeline. By the time Camp NaNo started, I was running on fumes. The last thing I wanted to do was write.
Despite my flagging enthusiasm, I proceeded with the session. I chose to set a time goal, which allows participants to work towards a certain number of hours instead of words. A time goal made more sense for the session. My word count would be fluctuating wildly as I edited the story. It would’ve been a hassle to track how many new words I’d written.
I signed up for 75 hours. I planned to split my daily goal into two sessions, one in the morning and one at night. An hour and fifteen minutes at a time seemed doable.
Beginning the Revisions
I had never revised a story before. I had a general idea about the overall editing process from an article in the The Writer magazine called “Drafting Those Many Drafts” (Feb. 2018), but I didn’t really know what I was doing.
I started by getting my original files in order. I duplicated the TMV Part 1 Scrivener project and named it “TMV Part 1 V2” (V2 for version 2). Instead of having my usual running list of scenes, I organized the files into three folders that represented each act of the Three-Act Structure. I also changed the names of any file that didn’t fit my chapter naming scheme or sufficiently describe the scene.
Next I inserted new scenes into the original draft. If you recall, TMV Part 1 didn’t follow the Three-Act Structure or the Mythic Structure, so I added scenes to my timeline to fill the plot holes. I created files for each of those new events. In most cases, I wrote a bit of each scene to make sure I had put them in the right place.
I also imported some files from my old Magical Mistress story, a precursor to TMV. Those imports caused extra work. For instance, I had to convert the scenes from first person perspective to third. The biggest edits, however, occurred when an imported scene depicted similar events as a scene in TMV. If there was a redundancy, I either chose the better of the two scenes, merged them, or occasionally, repurposed the old scene.
Lastly, I incorporated new points-of-view into the story. In my first draft, I told the story solely from the perspective of my protagonist, Ayalisse. I had decided to add the perspectives of two other characters, Eden and Parker, while I was revising my timeline. Important magical things needed to happen in the story that Ayalisse wouldn’t know anything about.
I focused most of my attention on mixing the new perspectives into TMV‘s weak beginning. The story originally began the morning after Ayalisse receives Eden’s powers. Eden’s perspective shows the reasons behind the power transfer, while Parker’s perspective shows the buildup to and the immediate aftermath of the transfer.
For the rest of the story, which I didn’t plan as extensively, I put new perspectives in places that similarly needed a smoother transition. I added nearly 20 new scenes in total.
Unfortunately, my slacking off came back to haunt me. Improvising the changes to the second half of my revised timeline caused a domino effect. For example, I deleted a lot of material from Act 2, which messed up things in Act 3, namely the ending. In turn, those changes messed up a large chunk of TMV Part 2.
One tool did make the organization process easier: Scrivener’s index card feature. Halfway through the session, I abandoned my hand-drawn timeline for the cards. I wrote summaries on each one so I could see what the scenes were about when I hovered over their files in the Binder. I also applied colored labels to indicate whose perspective(s) each scene showed. I had never used the cards before (in Scrivener or in real life), but I fell in love with them.
I constantly manipulated those index cards–adding, deleting, shuffling them–as I tried to piece my story back together.
Counting Down the Hours
My limited success with the revisions wasn’t the only thing making the session difficult. The time goal thing was not working for me.
First off, I was bad at tracking my progress. I logged my work times in a notepad and manually tallied the hours every day. I calculated wrong a few times, particularly when it came to odd minute amounts, so I had to ask my mom to double-check for me. Very embarrassing! I eventually installed a time-tracking app called Toggl on my laptop to eliminate that extra headache.
Second, the daily grind was killing me. I was caught in a vicious cycle: work hard on my 2.5 hours, spend the next few days exhausted, work twice as hard to catch up, spend a couple more days nursing a migraine. Again and again and again. Things were getting out of hand.
I had set my goal too high. Seventy-five hours was too much for me–ironic, given that I had joked on Twitter that 60 hours seemed too easy. I swallowed my pride and lowered my goal to 60 hours. I still struggled. I lowered it to 45 hours. Didn’t help. I seriously considered quitting the session altogether.
As a last ditch effort, I lowered my goal to 30 hours. Thirty hours–one hour a day for each day of April–was the lowest goal I would allow myself to set. If I couldn’t handle that, I would quit. I was slightly ahead of schedule, so I used the extra days to pull myself together.
Lowering my goal to 30 hours gave me some kind of reverse psychology boost. It took the pressure off, which allowed me to get more done. I knocked out the last eight hours of my goal in two days like it was nothing!
I probably won’t set a time goal again. I can easily get ahead with a word goal by writing extra words every day. With a time goal, it was hard enough to get through the required time, let alone do extra hours. I couldn’t stop watching the clock. Time goals are torture.
Conclusion
Well, I survived the April Camp NaNoWriMo session. TMV Part 1 came out a stronger story overall in its second draft. The story flows better than it did before. I love the new perspectives. I even ended up with 6,000 new words. All of that research definitely served me well.
TMV‘s future, however, remains a question mark. Despite the improvements, the story still needs tons of work. To make things worse, I read Anne R. Allen’s article Saying Goodbye to That WIP: When It’s Okay to Give Up on a Writing Project during the session. The piece, which lists signs that a story probably won’t work out, supported my suspicions that TMV is a hopeless case.
I don’t want to quit yet. I think there’s a good story buried in there. I still have plots that I want to wrap up, characters that I want to explore. I’d say there’s at least two parts left in the story. But I’m going to take the popular advice of letting TMV simmer for awhile.
I already signed up for July’s Camp NaNoWriMo session. I plan to write something nonfiction, perhaps a memoir. My goal is 15,000 words.
I’ll let you know how it goes!