My Nano novel is stalled, at least as far as true forward motion is involved, ever since I realized a chapter wasn't working in a way which would affect the other chapters.
The official Nano cure for that situation is to pretend you had already fixed it an move on. But what if you won't know exactly what the fix is until you actually make it?
The whole Nano thing is about piling on the word count, which is good for new writers to develop good writing work habits and learn to finish their projects.
But the goal is also to have a novel when you are done. Or at least most of one. I believe if you find yourself piling up random chapters, it is perfectly legit to junk some of them, to re-plan, to re-write, if it means that you come up with 20000 words of some one novel rather than 50000 words of scenes which will never make up one novel.
I realize that saying this might encourage some to re-write when they need to be pushing forward. If you have not tried writing a novel before, I'd say DON'T re-write, just push ahead until you meet the word count goal.
But if you are a person who has written before and has a certain degree of experience with how your own writing self works, I'd say feel free to do some needed re-writing--- IF that re-writing is the re-visioning of a key point of the novel and not just re-arranging the novel. (Yes, I know I have an over-active hyphen this morning.)
My novel Bakoun is based on a set of ideas that became my Nano 2005 novel Viridian (uncompleted). It's gone through many changes of characters--- it's more of an idea story than a character story.
I guess it was inspired by the Worldwar/Colonization series by Harry Turtledove. He has his aliens invade in the midst of World War 2. In his story, the humans succeed in standing up to the aliens (but not driving them off Earth) because the humans are more innovative and scientific progress comes more quickly to us, while the Race (the aliens) moves forward at a glacially slow pace.
I was inspired to a story in which the human advantage is not in technology development, but in language. Humans have many languages, and can continue to learn new languages throughout their lifespan. The Bakoun (aliens) can learn language only during an imprinting period in infancy and early childhood. It IS possible for a Bakoun child to be imprinted with two languages, the Bakoun language and an Earth language, but that increases the risk that the child will not learn any language at all (and be killed as defective). Adult Bakoun can learn to say personal names derived from other languages, and perhaps laboriously memorize one or two simple words, but they can never get to a point where they can construct sentences in the language. A nice contrast to all those fictional aliens that can learn Earth languages in twenty minutes or less.
So, my goal for today's Nano work is more to make a simple road map of some of the early chapters, add a few needed chapters and perhaps junk a few others.
Another goal involves my chapter headings. Each chapter begins with a Bible verse in Esperanto, and ends with a repetition of the verse, the English versions, and translations of the key Esperanto words involved. Yes, this is a plan that only a few language geeks could love.
My problem with it is that I wanted the verses to be both faintly relevant to the chapters, and progressive--- that is, the easier verses at the beginning. This is not working, so I have to go through and plan the verses a little better. I think what I'm going to end up doing is rough out a few chapters of something I've had in mind for a while 'Esperanto through the Bible' --- an Esperanto textbook teaching basic Esperanto through Bible verses. And use the first few example verses as my new chapter headings for 'Bakoun'.
What I need to do about that today is collect a massive list of very short Bible verses. I had a good source in an old catechism book that was my mother's (or perhaps it's just the same as my mom's but bought second-hand), but I can't find the book for love or money. I welcome any short-verse suggestions, or links to short-verse websites, from all my readers the public at large. They needn't all be uplifting memory verses--- I plan to use 'Judas went out and hanged himself' at some point, but I hope no one's going to 'go thou and do likewise.'
NOTE: 'Esperanto through the Bible' is going to be one of those 'Creative Commons' things so that anyone so inspired can translate the English bits to their own language.
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