The main thing I noticed is that I went through all the major plot points for the second act of my three act plot, and yet I wrote 21,000-ish words this NaNo. (The draft of the first act was 82,000 words!!) Something is definitely weird there, and this part will need plenty of revision, if I even keep it in.
I pantsed a lot of this part since I thought it was going to be a chaotic series of battles with a lot of character introspection that would eat up the wordcount. But I think my writing style has somehow shifted to become more action-based rather than full of descriptions and introspection this round.
Spoiler! :
I also came up with lots of wild ideas while pantsing, including adding robots to this setting and (spoiler: killing off most of the main antagonist’s team before she will do a one-on-one duel with the protagonist in the third act)
My main takeaways:
1. Just because my plot outline for two parts looks to be a similar length doesn’t mean my wordcount will end up the same for both.
2. I probably shouldn’t try and improvise my way through drafting the second act? It might be more efficient to do the improvisation in an early summary-run of the story and then do a draft that is more planned out. That way I can exploit my ability to come up with wild ideas while writing stuff down without having to write several 150K+ revisions before having a ‘complete’ story.
3. I should probably write or plan in the emotionally important scenes that inspired the story first. Because I almost forgot to put in one such scene that is important to a lot of the dialogue later on. And I also realised that I actually made the same mistake in the first NaNo I did with Mutant Families. Now I still have one scene missing such that a conversation between Ren and his father in the third act will not make much sense xD (My plan is to change the wording temporarily and then *maybe* put back the poetic echo in my second revision if it still seems like a good idea.)
I guess I initially thought I'd just be able to insert the scenes in when it made sense. I'd rehearsed those scenes via daydreams so many times, but I overestimated my memory of them plus how flexible the direction and pace of the plot could be such that I could cover flashback scenes.
Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. — William S. Burroughs
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