Fast Fiction

So here’s the wrap-up I promised.

Every year I want to do something different for National Novel Writing Month.

This year I wanted the NaNoWriMo experience of writing crap. In the sense that I had not idea what I was going to do, I was just going to write. And of course, I did write crap. Probably more crap per paragraph than I’ve written before. I just sat down on November 7th with a scant notion of an idea and just wrote. With no plan and no expectations.

What’s good that came out of it? There’s a good idea there. It’s actually an idea that might make a good play, so I’ll try to work on that.

For those who don’t care to download the PDF (and who can blame you), here’s a brief synopsis of what the story might be:

Maddie Fairfax was born with the unfortunate name of Kendra Gross. Sure, it wasn’t Ima Pigg, but it was bad enough that she thought that it was holding her back. So she changed her name to something less offensive - Rachel Watson. A nice bland name and she became a nice bland girl. Not happy with the bland life she thought long and hard this time and changed her name to Maddie Fairfax.

Maddie Fairfax was a big hit. She became a top residential real estate agent in Los Angeles with her face on bus benches and money in the bank. What she didn’t consider was that this was a new era. She boarded a plane in Las Vegas and when she went to catch her connecting flight, she found that she was no only on the no-fly list, but of such interest that she was immediately taken into custody for questioning.
And she’s held in the basement in an interrogation room for 72 days. She was eventually released, but of course changed slightly from her long isolation on Christmas Day. She heads to her parent’s house, who of course try to get her to go to Washington, DC to testify before the Senate about abuses of power by the Patriot Act. She visits with the Senator and before she starts off on her long drive across the country, she decides to go back home and change her name back to Kendra Gross.

Okay, the plot could use some work. But that’s what I wrote.

Next year I think I’m going to do a bit more work, maybe start over again with a tried and true plot. Maybe an adaptation.

Equally interesting are the stats:

Maddie - 76 instances
Maddie Fairfax - 50 instances
Rachel Watson - 42 instances
Kendra Gross - 29 instances
Los Angeles - 44 instances
Las Vegas - 25 instances
I - 2802 instances
name - 115 instances
and - 1773
alphabet (all forms) - 3 instances

counts
50,236 words
212,839 characters
1,485 paragraphs
4,508 sentences

averages
sentence/paragraph - 3.0
words/sentence - 11.1
characters/word - 4.0

readability
passive sentences - 2%
Flesch Reading Ease - 79.7
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 4.8

Finally, amount of time to write: 30.5 hours. No wonder it reads at less than a fifth grade level!