NaNoWriMo 2023 Progress Report
NaNoWriMo 2023: First Blood!
Part of my strategy is to get my work up and published (well, self-published) as soon as possible, both to show progress and to stop me from fiddling with it.
And, it must be said, to start earning some Medium.com money.
Strategy
The idea is to produce about a hundred chapters — this may change, I’ve never done this before — showing the process of Sherlock Holmes solving a mystery, narrated by his trustworthy companion Doctor Watson, who occasionally lends a hand apprehending a miscreant or ferreting out a bit of information but is mainly there to chronicle the adventure.
I have the idea of making a certain percentage of these chapters red herrings or non-sequiturs or unconnected to the thread of the story in order to stymie any readers wanting to take shortcuts to the end of the mystery.
The intention is to ensure that readers work their way logically through each chapter, rather than leaf through the stories looking for the answer. More reading time equals more engagement equals more money.
So I may well write the thing in a random fashion, alternating between critical information and total rubbish.
Each chapter has a single five-letter word title, lifted from the list of Wordle winners in random order. Essentially meaningless, they serve as identifiers in my (yet to be written) Access database where I keep track of every chapter and ensure that the mystery can be solved.
Tone
“So, this is fanfiction you’re writing?” a fellow NaNoWriMo asked.
Yes, and no. I suppose. While I want the writing to be in the style of a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I’m a firm believer in the idea that I can never be as much Conan Doyle as Conan Doyle and that by trying I diminish my own individual writing style.
So I’m aiming for a happy medium. I’ll try to use the phrasings and words of the writer and his period as much as possible, but I’ll keep my own somewhat quirky style of humour and wordplay as much as possible. When I write in German, no native German speaker is going to consider my work Hochdeutsch but any German who knows my English style would recognise me. Quite apart from the mangled grammar and odd word choices.
I’ve been reading the Sherlock Holmes canon for several months, on and off. Now, I’m reading nothing but, plus whenever I’m not actually writing I have Stephen Fry reading a Holmes audiobook; a pleasure in its own right.
I’m hoping to develop an ear for the phrasing, the style, the distinctive voice of Conan Doyle. Not to ape him but to echo him in my own way. These are my stories that I am telling a century or so later for an audience from a very different world in a medium that he could not have imagined.
I can reinterpret Conan Doyle in a style distinctly my own without fooling or confusing my readers.
At least, that is the aim. And, as ever, if I’m not enjoying the process, then what is the point?
You’ll have to forgive me. It is early days yet. I have published my first chapter, one that is very near the start, one that sows the first red herring, and one that gives an indication of the style of the prose and of the game itself.
