Last year, I called a girlfriend who lives out of province to catch up, and she told me that she and the four members of her family (hubbie and three primary school kids) were writing novels!It seemed ambitious, but she is a home school teacher of 3 and a teacher by profession, so I thought she and her teacher husband were just working that into their lives they are a little more free to plan than most.
It turns out they are writing a novel in November, and they are far from alone. It turns out that November is not just Movember, a month to raise awareness and funds for male genital cancer, but it is also National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for those in the know.
Unfortunately for her, she never did get to the point where she could say she "won" (In NaNoWriMo parlance, you are a winner if you write 50,000 words in the 30 day month of November). She was keeping up admirably, while helping her kids to write theirs as well, and had high hopes of weekend retreat at a cabin in the woods, when she fell on the first time out cross-country skiing, and had a fracture of her writing hand that, needless to say, derailed her success for the rest of the month. But she had already developed a character, and had a plot and a setting, and was on her way to going somewhere with this novel that she had started.
At the same time, I entertained the thought of "joining" in midway. Thank goodness I had the good sense not to! I did, however, come up with 3 characters for a longstanding idea of a series, and left it at that.
In the summer, I was invited to participate in a camp. Part of the camp was a marathon. This was an an escalating number of words to reach in a period of time so short I only kept up for the modest first two legs. But it gave me a taste, and I signed up on the website.
In September, emails begin to arrive, and I finally open a document mid October that suggests a six week preparation course that I think is quite well done. I take some notes one day, and signup for my first NaNoWriMo. I figure I'll just take the time frame, make a modest goal of 250 words a day, and look forward to starting. I write a page a day for a few days, and then I see a "write-in" at a neighbourhood coffee shop that I decide to attend. I forget my paper and notes, as I figure the two hour window will be too hard to do much but planning, but when I arrive, I realize I left the papers at the front entrance, and all I have is a phone, and 3 eager writers who have all "won" NaNoWriMo in the past, two of them more than once. (I was impressed but only after do I learn that everyone can be a winner, if you just write 50,000 words.) So I write on my phone for a couple of 20 minute sprints, and I am inspired. My modest goal is a good idea in general, but this program is all or nothing, and writing 1667 words a day is the prescribed minimum. I didn't think that was doable, but that night, I write over 2000 words, and I am hooked, but WAY behind. Maybe I didn't believe it, and still in the view of, "I've never written anything near this, so already this is worth it if I just do something", I fall off for the weekend, and then write NOTHING for the next 4 days of 12 hour workdays, finishing too late to make the next Starbucks meeting on the Thursday that just past.
So today is a hard day. November 15th is half way. That means I should be at 25,000 words by midnight, and the over 6000 words I was proud of last Sunday is looking woefully inadequate. My only badges are 1,2, and 3 day streaks and a 5000 word one. But I had a few ideas while I was washing the dishes and making lunch, and I am off for the next three days. I calculate, that at my 8 words per minute, I could write 540 words an hour, and I have proven to myself last week in the sprints, that 15-20 minutes is enough time to do something. So while my daughter cleans up her room, I write over 800 words in less than an hour, superceding what was predictably impossible. Another 15 minutes while she is in the bathroom, and an hour during homework, and I have the daily quota I was suppose to be meeting all along. Bedtime, and I finish the thoughts, and I have written over 2000 words, and am encroaching in on the 10,000 word badge.
I think the winning idea, beyond daily writing, and a steady goal, is that you are to write and not edit. Not all 50,000 words will be equal in quality. Some would argue that this is destined to be an output of low quality words. What I am finding, though, after a lifetime of editing and careful crafting, is that my brain needs to learn the skill of never looking back. Like brainstorming, it is too easy to poo-poo ideas or crush the seed of one with early criticism. Writing like this is freeing, and today is the first day that I see a plot emerging where I didn't know where to go next. In a murder mystery, there is a death. Too often, the first plot twist in a tv show is an unlikely incredible event. To find a credible inciting event is no easy task, and without the drama aforementioned, the story can get pretty boring.
Fortunately for me, my daughter is not yet allowed to criticize, and neither am I.
A pep talk from author Erin Morgenstern (A Nighttime Circus) was a motivator today too, and in part I have to credit for some things falling into place that I was afraid they wouldn't. She insists that you don't have have the whole plot laid out in front of you, with post its and cue cards. She doesn't. She says she, who has written the NaNoWriMo way, tends to focus on a scene that plays out, and where it fits is to work out later. So I took that to heart today. I had a four ideas, and in laying them out, I started to see how, with small changes to the characters stories, I could used some of the ideas to move the plot forward. If I swapped one story that fits better with another character, some plot turns came up naturally.
I am 9200 words on day 15 /30. That leaves me with 40800 words to write in the last half of the month. With four night shifts, and a multitude of other obligations, I have 2720 words to write on average a day. It's a long shot, but if I fail, what fun has it been to see just how far I have come anyways!
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