This blog post title was stolen from Chris Baty’s NaNoWriMo manual which gives advice on preparing for and surviving the 30-day writing frenzy.
I hadn’t originally intended to blog about my NaNoWriMo experience as I see Monkey Bear Reviews as a place to discuss the books I read, not my writing aspirations. However, several considerations caused me to change my mind. First and foremost, I’m spending so much time writing that I’m reading even less than usual. Less reading means fewer reviews. Secondly, I’m not blog hopping as much as I normally do, and am therefore blissfully unaware of any and all RomLand kerfuffles. (If you know of any, please don’t inform me. I’m enjoying my temporary bubble of contentment.) Last but not least, it’s been brought to my attention that some of you are actually interested in reading about my writing woes. So I’ve decided to do a weekly update on my NaNoWriMo progress. At the very least, it will be a good motivator to keep going.
I’m the Queen of the Plotters. Before I begin a new book, I have my entire story mapped out, my synopsis polished to perfection, my characters have been interviewed and all their idiosyncrasies recorded in elaborate detail. Once I’ve all that time planning, things frequently don’t flow as they should. I get disconcerted by characters not behaving as I’d intended them to. Plotlines meander in unexpected directions. Generally by the time I reach the halfway point, I’ve spent hours agonising over the correct placement of commas and other minutae that I’m totally burned out. The result? Yet another unfinished manuscript.
NaNoWriMo is a completely different approach. The idea is quantity over quality and the goal is to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. Some participants spend the month of October planning their novel in detail, much as I described my usual method above. Others sit down on the 1st of November and just start writing. I compromised. I spent Saturday the 31st of October thinking about the story I’d like to tell and the characters in it. I did Alicia Rasley’s excellent writing prep worksheet ‘Outline Your Novel in 30 mins’, and that was the extent of my preparation.
It’s the end of the fourth day of the challenge. So far, I’ve written 10,649. That’s pretty good going but I know I won’t have time to write as much after my mother goes home (she’s visiting us at the moment). In order to meet the daily minimum of 1,667 words, I set my clock to get up a couple of hours before the kids. So far, I’ve managed to stick to this regime, even though it’s killing me to get up so early. I am decidedly not a morning person!
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for early starts, I’m pleasantly surprised by how much I manage to get done. However, producing such a quantity of material in such a short space of time makes for a very rough draft. I’m sure much of it is drivel. I’m tempted to go back and highlight some of the worst prose purple, purely for my own amusement.
If you’re participating in this year’s NaNoWriMo, I’d love to hear how you’re getting on. If you haven’t been bitten by the writing bug, please tell me what books you’re looking forward to in December because my list is pretty sparse.
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Books I’m looking forward to in December? Er… in all honesty, I’m looking forward to whittling my TBR pile down to the point that I can actually walk in that half of my bedroom without shifting around piles of books. That is all.
Back when I wrote novels, I would not plot out the story at all. If I plotted out the story, then I knew what would happen. And if I knew what was going to happen, I didn’t really see much point in writing it down. This why I no longer write novels.
@heidenkind LMAO!
You’re dedicated!! Go you! Plot? The most I do is think of the next scene and go from there. Usually I do the choose your own adventure way of writing. If character A is going to go either left or right, then outcome is going to be different in whichever way I take my characters.
Nothing much to read for December. There is a YA book called Beautiful Creatures getting all the raves that comes out Dec 1 and I still have the latest Anna Campbell to read.
I have a very broad outline for where mine is going, but what happens in between is all up to the characters. I have always written this way. I don’t really plan on trying to get published (certainly not any time soon) so it’s just fun to see what happens! I’m up to around 11,000 words and haven’t worked on it yet today.
I do everything all wrong. Always have, and I doubt I’ll change. (I’m getting long in the tooth for “growing up.”)
My unwritten books are all in my head. A book starts to let me know it’s getting close to “its time” when I start thinking of solutions to practical and logistical problems that my initial set-up may have generated. I start to imagine the first scene: where logically does the story start? I don’t have an outline — remember, at this point nothing is written down; it’s all in my head — but I can visualize the linear sequence of events for the main character, often superimposed on a conventional 12-month calendar.
I did click on Alicia Rasley’s 30-minute exercise; I couldn’t answer half the questions. My character’s goals are situational, and rather human. For example, in my NaNoWriMo novel, my heroine wants two things: to help out her sister and a family friend, and to do well in law school and a subsequent law career. Boring. Until somehow those two goals combine alchemically and land her on a fictional reality TV show. That was never one of her goals, and she certainly doesn’t want to win the show’s prize. And she really doesn’t want to fall in love with one of the producers while she’s pretending to be her twin sister.
See? I can’t get that to fit the Rasley format. I just have these people in my head and I want to write about them.
[shhh -- don't tell Sarah, but there's a teensy kerfuffle over at Dear Author about authors using shortcuts. As a reader, and now a writer (but not an author . . . yet), I can't help thinking -- how does a writer know if she's using shortcuts? If I polish my NaNoWriMo novel, get a bunch of people to read and comment on it, am lucky enough to find an agent, and/or publisher to publish it . . . what if NONE of these people points out some shortcuts I took? Who are the shortcut police? I respect that Jane et al. are going to point them out if I were so lucky as to have a published novel that got reviewed on Dear Author -- okay, so not me, as Jane's pretty clear she won't read novels with lawyers in them (and hasn't that explained a lot?!) -- but who's going to point them out in advance of publication? Just my thinking, you understand... and not a word to Sarah about this!]
Okay, so last night was a wash-out writing wise: We’re on holiday for Ross’s 50th birthday, and when we got back to the room (I tend to write at the end of the day), the wireless internet connection was broken. It took the techs an hour to fix, so very little writing got done. I’m up around 8,000 words, and will be able to do better once we’re back home on Friday.
And if anyone wants to don a Shortcut Police Officer’s uniform and come read about a fictional version of Big Brother . . . I’d be happy to share.
You’re doing great! I love the dedication and planning. This is my first year. So far so good. My blog post will be shorter and shorter. I know less reading for me too. I did do a loose outline to guide me and I think it will be helpful. At least I hope it will.
@katiebabs Thank you! You also seem to be hard at work NaNoing.
@Meghan 11,000 words is excellent progress. Well done!
@Magdalen Your fictionalized version of Big Brother sounds intriguing. I must be one of the few people on the planet who has never watched a full episode of Big Brother. I saw about 10 mins of the German version a few years ago because a guy at my university was on it. Apart from pouting and posing, all they seemed to do was have sex. Do they do that on the US version, or is it all edited out?
@Kwana Yeah, the dedication is definitely helpful. Much as I despise getting up so early, it’s definitely the way to go. I seem to write fiction best when I’m not awake. Actually, that’s a scary thought…
The American Big Brother version is silliness on steroids, and not always in a happy way. I’m pretty sure the entire concept (didn’t it start in the UK?) is a variation on the experiment where too many lab rats are kept in a too-small cage and they all go crazy. Some TV executive thought it would be fun to watch humans interact in similarly insane ways.
There’s some “hooking-up” on the American show, but the deed (not shown on the network episodes, but available for those who pay to watch the 24-7 feed on the Internet) is prefaced by a massive amount of drivel. It used to be a fun show to watch because the contestants were so over-the-top outrageous, and edited in ways that exacerbated that unintended humor. At some point, though, I think it stopped being fun.
I got the idea of having someone on the show who was NOT an idiot, but who the producers had completely underappreciated. Someone who’d be thinking about the way the show is constructed, and not just about how the game is played.
Eh, we’ll see if it works out.
Congratulations, everyone, on doing so well in these first few days of NaNoWriMo!