In the past month, I have been writing as part of NaNoWriMo 2022 and it has coincided with my last module as part of my Masters. The Creative Dissertation has been the hardest module but NaNoWriMo 2022 gave me the tools to keep track of everything and plunge into the words. I have not forced the words to hit the NaNoWriMo target, I used it to keep track of the words in my creative piece, reflective essay and everything else included in the dissertation.
I need to track how many versions of a single chapter I have written, there are minimal variations between them but I have always kept each version in case I have added a valuable detail within one of them that may not exist in the others. Now I have the difficulty of sifting through the versions to see if there is anything of use. Once I finished my initial draft of book one of the series, I worked for days searching for other drafts of the book, any scenes or notes and compiled them into a Scrivener file. Some people may say I’m making more work for myself, but I have always been one of those writers who type notes or a passage somewhere so I don’t forget it and then forget where I filed it! An extremely annoying and bad habit! Now I have them all in one file, the documents are still disjointed and replicated but it’s easier for me to have the replicas on split-screen view and can identify the changes and combine them if I think it’s a good detail for the story.
The process became surprisingly easy and I was able to cut down the amount of unnecessary material that I might not otherwise have seen and combined chapters that no longer stood well on their own. To date, I have written six chapters but incorporated content from twelve chapters of each draft I have. Some of the material I got rid of was painful but I know that it wasn’t useful in the prose anymore with the new approach I was going for. My plan is to write a very rough draft of book one to get rid of the amount of documents I have, make notes of any extra detail to remember and then tighten it up when I’m faced with each chapter.
Writing ‘Realms of Magic’ book one for NaNoWriMo 2022 was really productive and I’m looking forward to getting this rough draft finished so that I can move on to developing characters, world plot lines, themes and more. NaNoWriMo 2022 has given me the opportunity to look at my series through a magnifying glass and depicting key plot points and plot suggestions which drives my series on!
The Life of Sophie 