(Surprise) November 2022: NaNoWriMo
Pop quiz: What do you do when your months is already full with deadlines? Has your question ever been to commit to write a 50.000 word long story? If yes, or similar, you might be kinda like me.
There's been this thing around the internet for a few years now, called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. It's basically what it sounds like: People committing to writing a novel (a text upwards of 50.000 words) during the month of November. I've heard about it in a video about something or other at the end of October, and decided to give it a look. I had no idea how it was going to go, or how it was supposed to work, but considering there was a websites and forums and writing groups, I was suddenly faced with a question: Am I doing this now? Remember, it was the end of October, so I had to decide relatively quickly. 50.000 words is nothing to sneeze at, especially not when you're also doing other stuff in your day and have had an on-again off-again relationship with writer's block over the past years. I had to decide whether I would commit to the idea within those few days.
Now, there's a good piece of writing advice I've heard around when it comes to longer process. Write the scenes you want to write, then fill in the blanks when you're in the mood for it. I decided to stick to that. I would have to aim for about a 1700 word average per day, if I wanted to make the deadline. This is probably a good time to mention that I've never actually finished a project with a ~50.000 wordcount. Most of my projects are either significantly shorter, or significantly longer. That means I have no idea how much time it would usually take for me to complete such a project. 1700 words per days just sound like a lot. I know I can fill a page or two on good days, and that might land me in the green, but I also have to tell a coherent story first. I decided that I was going to hedge my decision on whether or not I could come up with an outline of a story, along with a timeline before the 1st of November. You can probably guess how successful I was with that.
Outlining a story isn't really the hard part at any point. Outlining is like making a tower out of building blocks. You don't really have to think. It's a mostly linear process, and you don't necessarily have to take setting and characters into account in much detail. I didn't intend for the story to exceed the 50.000 words goal by much, so no complicated plotlines or hopefully not too much of the dialogue I tend to write whenever I'm just having fun with my writing. It was supposed to be short, comprehensive, and sweet.
I have a process for thinking about stories. Setting dictates characters, which dictate actions, which dictate themes. The last point is optional, so I'm leaving it out. Planning would need to be careful to even make the attempt. I've been spending a lot of time in sci-fi land when it comes to fiction writing, so decided not to spend more time there. Classical fantasy settings are still not for me. The aesthetic doesn't quite appeal to me. What I've occasionally liked dabbling in steampunk stuff. This one too is mainly for the aesthetic. I can blend this with a lot of the sci-fi elements with the edge taken off. That's should make for a nice backdrop to a simple story with the same sort of characters that I enjoy writing. I'm not going to change much of my approach otherwise. So there I was, setting dictating characters, dictating actions, and I still had a few days left to think about whether I was going to participate or not. I was definitely wouldn't be able to get a writing group together, mainly because by the time I would've made a forum post, the month would've started, so I might as well give it a go. Nobody was watching so nobody could hold me accountable. It also wasn't like I didn't have an actual project this month, so if I failed terribly, I could probably pretend this never happened.
Week 1
Okay, so maybe 1700 words is actually a little much. No matter how fast you can come up with stuff, getting that much text onto a page will take you an hour or two in a day. I can usually find that time (please don't ask how, I will be ashamed explaining it). However, I had four days out of the week where I didn't plan to write anything. To people like me - all ambitions and no planning skills - that means front-loading. I didn't frontload enough that week. The good news was, I could write things down chronologically and only needed to go back for minor additions or corrections. I was going to have to pick up my pace a little.
Week 2
That's the week I picked up said pace. There is something to be said about which parts write themselves faster than others. Keeping a conscious line of events in mind and committing to skipping everything in between is a good way to keep momentum going, though there are clearly types of scenarios I have more trouble with than others. I tend to get stuck in some of the character-building stuff whenever I don't have all information to work with. I get that it's mainly because of the way I construct characters that like to keep some things private, and avoid certain plot beats that are centered on revealing previously unknown information. Since I got all the act I stuff done in week 1 though, that means I could get into the real meat of the story here.
Week 3
Aaaand finished. Well, mostly. I'm going to call it finished, even though this is very much a first draft. I'm also really tired. When I finished the plot as I had drafted it at the beginning of the month, I had a problem. About 3000 of them in fact. I was 3000 or so words short of the 50.000 mark. Maybe I've abbreviated it a little too much in places.
Anyway, I decided to add a few more character building scenes in places and inserted some dialogue I originally thought I'd write less of in this project. As soon as I cracked the 50.000 mark though, I was done, and gladly so.
The Takeaway
What have we learned? Mainly, that this isn't really what I'd call a healthy creative process. I'm not burnt out on writing, I think, evidenced by the fact that I'm still writing this directly after finishing up the story, but it just ate up much larger chunks of my days than I'm strictly speaking comfortable with. I suppose that's why you do it just once a year.
On the other hand, I'm honestly positively surprised that I didn't just ran into the wall at 30.000 words and stayed there until the deadline. I can apparently handle that turnaround with time to spare. A more healthy experience might be a deadline of three or four months, but maybe that is too long too. On the other hand, maybe then it wouldn't slow down my other text output to a depressing crawl. I'm on the fence of whether to repeat this next year, but I don't tend to get wiser with time, I'm afraid. Either way, this experiment, painful as it was, has a yield of one book planned badly and written on a whim. I'm not sure whether anybody is ever going to read it in its entirety and maybe I'll check about distribution options, but until then, here's a never proof-read draft, probably including continuity errors.