Over and Out (of uni)

This week I received my results for my final assignment, the overall module and the invitation to graduate and gain my MA in Creative Writing.

I was thrilled with my final result and the overall grade, and I am very excited about graduating alongside some of my classmates next year. Doing a distance learning course unfortunately means that I will not necessarily be attending with all of the people with whom I worked the most closely, but I understand a few of them will be there and I am looking forward to finally putting people to names and stories – we’ve met on zoom, a few of us, but it isn’t the same.

Happily, I spent November working on my novel for NaNoWriMo, and that was the spur I needed to keep on with my writing (and why I’ve been a little quieter here – full time work and a hefty writing project didn’t leave much room).

I finished the month bang on target, my novel now up to a whopping ~65,000 words with a few chapters and some early development to do – an almost complete first draft and the biggest project I have undertaken and (nearly) completed. I have been able to see this week out with another writing competition, zipping my entry off a day before the deadline, and now I finally have finished all the time-sensitive challenges I had.

What now, then? Well I do still have a writing ‘to do’ list: finish those last bits of novel (maybe a Christmas holiday project); develop my EMA into the novel I have in mind for that; work on a children’s story idea that occurred to me while practicing for my Welsh language course (the mind works in mysterious ways). Nothing has a particular deadline, and in a way I am happy to delay the novel a bit; it will provide me with a fresher pair of eyes when I get around to the first proper edit, and it delays the inevitable part where I prepare to send it off – a task I am both excited about and dread, as I know that it will bring with it innumerable rejection letters. That is something I need to prepare for mentally.

If NaNo taught me anything, I am definitely a ‘planner’ but sometimes, when I sit down to write, I become a ‘Pantser’ (someone who plans, vs someone who flies by the seat of their pants). I discovered this when my chapter structure developed from 19 and an epilogue to 24 and an epilogue as several chapters I had planned became at least two when I was writing them. The official designation for this is ‘Plantser’ someone who has found a balance between planning and ‘jumping in blind’; this has been quite a discovery for me as I had firmly believed myself a planner, but I suppose it is a bit like King says; ‘stories... make themselves’ and characters aren’t always going to do things in the way that you planned; they will often do things their own way. I am not sure I subscribed to incarnating my fictional characters before this project, but now I definitely see what he meant ( King, S. 2000, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft).

So I am going off on my junior fiction tangent, setting up a new scrivener project (other writing programs are available) which is quite exciting, and using what I have learned from my first voyage into the app to organise it better this time. Today I will plan – get down the ideas that I had first generated, think a bit more about these characters, then allow it to grow.