Science Fair Non-Project

Science fairs. I don’t want to go there, but for the sake of my mental health, permit me to rant for a moment. First of all, I grew up in Washington and did not participate in a single science fair when I was growing up. Not one. Nada. Am I clear on this point? They were extra curricular, extra credit activities. I didn’t need extra credit and wasn’t interested enough in science to do anything in that subject outside of school. I was a bookworm, I read outside of school. And wrote. Bet you didn’t see that coming, did you?

Anyway, fast forward to high school, I read sci-fi, but I’m still not really into science per se. In fact, I took chemistry and physics just so I wouldn’t have to take biology because I couldn’t get an A in the class unless I did a bug collection and there was no way in hell I was doing a bug collection. That was my attitude toward science. Moving on to college, I graduated in biology. But I still didn’t do a bug collection! Okay, that’s not true, I helped The Girl with hers. Next year, I’ll help The Boy with his.

The kids went to a charter school and I have a standing invitation from the science teacher to help when the ninth graders do dissections. Yay! (This is a person who writes romance . . .) This year I’m one of the science fair judges. As of the time I’m writing this, not posting it, my son has still not completed his science fair project. It’s due tomorrow. Hmm. I’m not judging his grade/category – they’ll figure that out somehow. Just as well, I’d flunk the little brat because I know he’s going to fake his data.

So, I never did the science fair thing as a kid, but I did it with my kids from third through eighth grade, twice. Last week, my extended family was at the in-law’s house gathered for something festive and my young nephew was complaining about his science fair project. Like my son, it was due and he hadn’t done it yet.

“Really? What’s your project?” I asked with interest. This kid was only interested in football, so to see him doing anything academic had me intrigued.

“Which paper towel is the best.”

I frowned. “That’s not a science fair project, that’s product comparison.”

“I’m only in sixth grade.”

I let it drop. My kids weren’t permitted to do product comparison or a research project in third grade (school rules, not mine) but maybe that’s because they went to a charter school and had higher standards. I almost had a chat with my sister-in-law about her youngest being robbed of a valuable learning opportunity, but decided against it. She already doesn’t like me, didn’t go to college, cares more about the name brand of her hoodie than has mistrust of the motivation of the school in question, so I let it drop. Besides, I was tired and wanted to go home. The Boy had some data to fake.

NaNo - Did I Write Garbage?

There’s an argument that during NaNoWriMo (and you thought we were done with this) you write a lot of ‘garbage’ because you’re frantically trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days and therefore not paying attention to quality. I disagreed with this oft-heard discouragement partially because I simply didn’t feel I edited any more ‘garbage’ from NaNo books than non-NaNo books, and partially because I think those critics are missing the point of NaNoWriMo. Some writers get so bogged down in making every sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter “perfect” that they never finish the book. NaNo is all about solving that problem. Making it “perfect” (and let’s be real, true perfection is subjective) is largely in editing and you have to have something to edit.

But I didn’t have any real data to back it up. So, let’s embark on a long-term project and explore the process, shall we?

I ended NaNo at 58,719 words. Yay. Then I came to a writing crisis and had to make some decisions about where I was going with this. So I took what I had and formatted it for Kindle to put it on Hubby’s tablet to see what he thought. Of course I had some disjointed scenes where I knew this was scene H (for example) but it was placed where B should be and scene G was only a three line idea. And some “(Look into this@@)” notes next to things that I looked into and removed. Mostly. And I changed the setting twice between when I started and this point. I also changed my male protagonist’s career, so I went and fixed those little tidbits and generally cleaned things up a bit. I even put in some general ideas on where chapters were going to be based on plot break, as opposed to word/page count, but the word count/chapter is oddly even in this one so far. Only chapter seven (in version 0.25) is radically ‘off’ in the word count range.

Anyway, back to my original statement, which was that some think you write a lot of garbage doing NaNo because you’re rushing. (Fidgets nervously.) I didn’t do a real edit here, this was making it readable and getting it ready to format for Kindle for a test reader.

I’m at 43,721 words now. Yes, I lost 14,998 words. Yes, I’m a little surprised, or I was at first. No, I’m not upset about it. No, I’m not changing my position that I wrote a lot of garbage because I was trying to write too fast. Here’s why:

I had a very vague idea of where I was going with this book when I started, not a detailed outline. I wasn’t even confident in the ending. That’s what sparked this writing crisis. It wasn’t that I didn’t like where the book was going, or I wasn’t comfortable with it, but I know my limits. I read and write certain genres. I’ve ventured into writing a genre I didn’t read before, it didn’t go well. I was starting to do it again. I was turning a romance book into a suspense novel. Now romantic suspense is fine, but not mystery suspense. It’s not in my arsenal.

So, do I take a break and see what it takes to add writing thriller and suspense to my arsenal and then go back and trim some romance scenes, or do I stick with familiar ground and say ‘this is primarily a romance’ and trim the scenes that were leading it off track? I chose option two. And I hadn’t connected those chapters (one is 5330 words, the other is 9991 words) to the main body of the book yet. We’ll call them chapters P and R, they’re that far down the line. No damage done, except to my word count.

Were they garbage? No. I’m saving them. I may use them somewhere else. Together with what I already have, the book is too suspense/thriller and not enough romance. Alone, each could be the major complication in a single book.

I believe I’ve said something like this before: Don’t fuss over making a single chapter or scene perfect until you finish the whole book, you might end up cutting it. I’ve done it before, and I just did it again. It’s part of the process sometimes. If you’re an uber-detailed plotter, you might escape this, but it’s really not as heartbreaking as it sounds.

Be Careful What You Wish For was a NaNo book and I cut the first chapter off of that. That first chapter was a prologue, now it’s the short story Meet Olive (free on Goodreads or ToriBrooks.com). And these two chapters may yet see the light of publication. See? It’s not so bad.

Now we’ll see what happens to those 43,721 words after I finish the rest of the book, revise it, and subject it to readers and an editor. How many will survive that? I did say it was a long-term project.