Week 65.5 (and a bit) – Studying for stories?

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to post on Thursday as usual, my writing day went a bit wonky and I ran out of time.

In the last few months, I’ve been thinking about doing some more studying. Well, as if by timing magic, I recent saw a newspaper article that led directly to a number of on-line university courses.  The best bit is not only are they completely on-line, they are also entirely free!

I am favouring a particular course, on human nutrition (there’s always a chance I’ll write a character who needs to know this stuff, and meanwhile it might curb my cake-eating tendencies).  I looked at an astronomy one but when it said you needed to solve basic equations, and then gave an example that looked like gobbledegook I decided it wasn’t for me.  And off tangent, isn’t gobbledegook a perfect word!

I don’t know if all writers are the same, but the more I know, the wider my writing framework becomes: I use parts of almost everything I learn in one way or another.  This might not be explicit but even in my current NaNo story I am incorporating Old English into place names.  Luckily with this story the main character names have meanings that work perfectly, even though they were just names picked for a coursework exercise.  One I didn’t even know was a proper name (it is, a spelling variation of a Sanskrit word)!

And that’s a nice segue into my NaNo update for yesterday, which was day 15.  I had a bit of a fail, because I didn’t quite get to 25,000 words (I got to 24,138) but I’m pleased I got that far because it wasn’t a great day for writing.

I am really happy with this progress: I’m already nearing last years total word count and that was pretty hard-going!  This many words, in a sustained and coherent story, in 15 days is an amazing achievement for me.

I have decided, therefore, to ignore all the forum posts where people say that they reached 50,000 words in ten or eleven days.  It’s a meaningless fact when I have no idea about the quality of their work, or whether they have many, and long, chapter titles, or if they have an emotional attachment to their stories.

In short, I cannot judge my own progress by looking at theirs.

So over the next 15 days, I want to carry on unravelling the story I am telling, and feeling excited about each decision that takes my characters a step closer to their destinies.

And after all, isn’t that what becoming a writer is all about?

Happy writing

EJ

🙂