My first NaNoWriMo draft was my Money Pit. I thought I would never get out of it. I haven't. I'm still in it 3 months of revision later. In fact please send help.
Things I've learned from my first NaNoWriMo draft-it wasn't a first draft at all. It was a zero draft or a "vomit" draft. That is my Money Pit that I've been in. I did a bad draft and I'm stuck.
This is the problem, and it has nothing to do with the writing quality, the plot, or inate talent of the writer. I simple wrote a 50,000 word stream of consciousness monster that is hell to edit. I didn't even bother with the basics: punctuation, capitalization, or even writing things in order. I didn't know the hell I was creating for myself by not doing things right in the first place.
So now I have my Money Pit. I've worked on it and it is not fun. I am never doing that again. With the time I have put in to it I could have rewritten the thing from scratch. Which is exactly what Tom Hanks had to do with his dream home in The Money Pit-tear the whole thing out and start again or risk getting trapped in a hell hole instead of a dream.
NaNoWriMo-there is a way to do it wrong. I thought I was doing it right, caffeine up and put those words down. Be an artist, Jackson Polluck that page. But Polluck didn't have to take out his red pen 2 months later and try to coax all those dots of paint into a bowl of fruit.
Bu I've learned my lesson. This April I am taking the time to go slower and as Alexander Godunov says to the man with the paint roller,"paint, paint." In other words, don't just slap it together and expect it to stand up. My April goal is all of my writing is going to be in actual paragraphs that make sense. I'm not doing big blocks of text like it was written on a scroll.
When I get to the end of April, I want something readable, that looks like a novel, and I can actually show it to someone. Then I can revise with my sanity intact. It's one thing to throw a coat of paint on or redo a bathroom. But something like insanity to redo every other word of a page covered in red underlines. I'm not gutting the whole house again.
Then hopefully I can get a little closer, a little faster to the dream.
