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.
she/her
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