Today’s the first day of NaNoWriMo. I don’t have many words down, though I do have at least one primary character, and a few potential supporting characters. And a few good opening paragraphs, with the remainder of the first chapter sketched out.
I’ve definitely got some themes down that I’ll be exploring. But I’m pretty much plotless. And my audience is entirely unclear. As is my process. I sat and wrote for about 90 minutes and got several paragraphs out, probably about 400 words. Then took a break for a few hours and came back and sketched out the rest of the chapter, thought through some additional ideas.
I also did some research - I kind of guessed that the writing process would bring about lots of research. As I figure out who these characters are, I need to learn more about the world they come from. So that’s been interesting but also a bit daunting (in terms of thinking about how much time this will really take, and whether I’m making this too ambitious of a project given that the whole point of NaNoWriMo is to finish the damn thing in a month). And but so while I expected to be doing some research into new subjects, I didn’t necessarily expect to learn new words. Or to blog about writing, because I want my writing energy directed toward the novel itself.
But I learned a word, and wanted to blog it, because I feel like a very sporadic blog about the writing itself would be nice, and having a repository for words I’m learning in the process and other research odds and ends would definitely be nice. Hence what we have here.
The word I learned today is recension. From wikipedia:
Recension is the practice of editing or revising a text based on critical analysis.[1] When referring to manuscripts, this may be a revision by another author. The term is derived fromLatin recensio ”review, analysis”. In textual criticism, particularly Biblical scholarship, the count noun ”recension” may be used to refer to a family of manuscripts sharing similar traits;[2] for example, the Alexandrian text-type may be referred to as the “Alexandrian recension”. The term “recension” may also refer to the process of collecting and analyzing source texts in order to establish a tree structure leading backward to a hypothetical original text; for example, the compilation and collation of the Qur’an by Uthman ibn Affan may be referred to as a process of recension.
