nanowrimo
This November marks the 10th annual National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. The name may sound strange but the actual event is stranger by far. Every November hundreds of thousands of people commit to writing a novel in thirty days. Here, “novel” is defined as 50,000 words. That’s about 1667 words per day. In old-school writing terms (where a manuscript page is approximately 250 words) that’s 6.7 pages per day. (In a typical paperback book it will be about 5-6 pages.) I’m not an expert or anything, but that seems a reasonable amount of output for a full-time writer, let alone someone who’s doing it for kicks after his day job.
I’d first heard about NaNoWriMo a couple years ago from one of my friends who has done it a couple times. I considered doing it last year but a couple things stopped me. First, one of the “rules” is that you can’t bring any text into the month. In other words, you can’t add 50,000 words to your existing novel. I thought that was odd. One of the things that I was hoping to accomplish was to actually work on one of my various half-started novels. The other thing that stopped me was that the focus seemed to be on word count. It didn’t matter what you wrote — as long as you churned out 50k words in the month.
Both of these things struck me as wrong, somehow. Shouldn’t you care about what you’re writing? Isn’t it better to write 50,000 good words that mean something to you? This year I decided to take the plunge and find out. Well, that’s halfway true. This year I thought about taking the plunge and finding out. I also told my wife; she in turn told some of my friends. So I was stuck. Write or die.
Four or five years ago I had this idea about a vampire who’s a private detective, but not cast in the “Angel” mold. In fact, he’s a little defensive about it. So I dusted it off, stirred in a few ideas stolen from Hitchcock and other places, and found myself with the beginnings of a plot.
It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was, in fact, not better to care about what you were writing. Not for this sort of exercise. Caring leads to careful writing. It also leads to revision (which is also frowned on), trying to find just the right word, and other types of general fiddling about. All of these things will serve to make a hard task even harder. The trick is to just get in there and fling some words around and see what happens. That’s not to say that you need to write crap — you just need to write something.
A funny thing happened a couple days in. It all started to make sense. Everything clicked. Sure, my lead fell in love with the wrong heroine. Yes, my plot went in a completely different direction from where I told it to go. If I’d been writing something that I “cared” about (and I do care about this, now) I don’t think I ever would have gotten this far. I certainly never have before.
I’d started novels before but never managed to finish one for a couple reasons. First, I have difficulty laying out and entire story from start to finish. I get too caught up in the “what ifs” of the situation. What if this happens? What if that happens? What is something doesn’t happen? I try to resolve all those issues, get bogged down, get bored, and drop the whole thing. I’ve done it time and time again. The second problem that I’ve had is that it seems like every idea that I come up with looks — from the starting line — like it’s going to fall way short of novel length.
This exercise has given me some insight into both of those problems. It’s way, way better (for me anyway — everyone’s process is different) for me to not try to resolve all the questions ahead of time. I think the best solution for me will be a two-stage process of outlining: first, a very loose outline of the overall plot; then — as I get to each section (however that works out) a smaller, more detailed outline of that bit. I think that will allow me to better adjust to things like the lead falling in love with the character who was supposed to be a one-line toss-off in a single scene. I’ve also picked up a few ideas on how to introduce subplots and complications to turn a very short — and totally linear — story into something more substantial and satisying.
Finally, I’ve learned that I can write on a deadline. (Though I have to admit that I’m a bit behind right now due to travel, vacation, and a dead laptop.) Whether I can write anything worth reading remains to be seen.
Tags: detective, nanowrimo, vampire, writing
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