Nanowrimo is done and dusted for another year… the actual event at least. For me the end of November marked 52,000 words through my 80,000 word manuscript- a success in terms of reaching Nanowrimo’s goal of 50,000 words in a month, and I have to admit that I’m feeling pretty good about my progress thus far. My manuscript is much improved, and I have deleted enough words now that I suspect my 80,000 words is actually closer to 65,000 (though there are still missing scenes that will need to be written before I’m done). Needless to say, I’ll be continuing with my edits – I set myself a due date by which I want my manuscript ready to send out and that time is fast approaching, and I still need a few readers to go over it.
But I wasn’t the only one taking part in Nano in my household, with my two eldest children taking part in the Young Writer’s Program. After the end of the month, we got in and started editing stories, reading back over them and making suggestions for improvements. My 7 year old daughter’s characters had no names, for instance, so I suggested it might be helpful to name them.
Today she decided she wanted to help me edit my story. She read through the first two pages, and told me it was very good, and she really enjoyed it. She read a little further, to a point in the story which involved a group of unnamed men who appear only at this point in the story.
“Do they have names?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“I think it would be good if they could have names.”
I told her I would keep that in mind, and she grabbed a pencil and jotted down a note in the margin – ‘names for men’.
“There,” she said. “So you remember.”
And there’s another writer in the making…
Heather Ewings 