(Disclaimer: contains shameless self-congratulation and bragging. You are under no obligation to read any further).
When I finished NaNoWriMo 2010 in a little under 8 days, I knew I could do better. I proved that in 2011, by bringing my personal best down to under 7 days. At that point, I foolishly opined that I could complete the 50k in five days, if I had them completely free. That would require me to be able to take time off work, though, which has not really been possible for financial reasons in the intervening time.
I improved my personal best again in 2012, to six days and fourteen hours, despite still having various professional commitments. Last year I was on track to better even that, but my chosen project ran into a thick tangle of character and theme issues which weren't fixable within a NaNoWriMo mindset (it would be fair to say, too, that I neither prepared well nor was quite as committed to it as my ambition required). Having thought at one point that I would break 6 days, I ended up finishing the 50k on the last day of the month, and then only by switching to another project altogether for the last 10-15k.
That actually gave my writing confidence quite a hit, and this year I've been going back and forth over whether to do NaNo. The biggest question was what project I was going to write; with the Second Realm over, I was having all kinds of trouble deciding what to work on next anyway, and choosing a project suited to the intensive, relatively research-and-planning-light NaNo process just made that question more difficult.
I settled on a plan whereby I'd only do NaNo if I could finish last year's project before November, so that I could get on with its sequel this year (that series remains almost uniquely suited to NaNo, as far as my ideas go). I failed utterly to get last year's project finished on time, though I did at least make some progress.
So I thought I wouldn't write something new for NaNo. I figured I could get on with one of the many bits of editing I need to do. Then I discovered that reading week for the courses I teach on falls this year on this week, the first week of NaNo. Since this entails not having to do anything this week for what this year is the much more significant of my jobs, I was gutted that I didn't have a proper NaNo project. I started to think about some way to make the 'edit things' plan more concrete.
Then life dropped another heavy hint. My current client for my other job turned out to be on a field trip from last Friday through this Wednesday (i.e. yesterday). Since that meant not seeing him until Friday of this week, the first week of November was now completely free. I gritted my teeth and tried to pretend I'd never bragged to myself that I could do it in five days if I had them completely free. I told myself I'd get through an entire editing pass on the season 1 collection of The Second Realm instead (no mean feat given that's currently around 125,000 words). I prepared accordingly.
And then the powers that be got sick of dropping hints altogether. I woke up on Thursday morning from a dream about the tail end of a horror movie scenario, the heroine finally escaping and burning down the haunted house, to realise that I had been given the seed of a new idea, well-tuned to address a theme I've been keen to address for some time.
Even then, I prevaricated somewhat, hemming and hawing over whether I had a setting I could write in, an ending I could write towards, a selection of characters which befitted this commitment. The muse, or whatever other vengeful god it is that sees to it we are required to make good on our outrageous boasting, obligingly answered my every question.
I wouldn't speak in such mystic terms, but seriously, it is sometimes pretty hard not to be superstitious. An entire novel plan fell into my lap in the space of about thirty hours right on the cusp of the best writing opportunity I've had in about three years.
So I wrote the damn thing. Well, in honesty, I wrote about half of it, padding frantically and egregiously. It's NaNo, there isn't time to stop and think about whether what you're writing really serves your final goals. The last day's progress included some pretty big I'm-definitely-editing-this-out-later moments; the main character's mother turned into an appauling comedic stereotype in the midst of an otherwise serious narrative about haunting and harassment, and I took a couple of thousand words to just tell a random unrelated ghost story mid-scene, for example.
But as of about 11:30 last night, I'd written my 50,000 words, in five days flat. Strangely, it's been physiologically the least debilitating NaNoWriMo I've ever done. I planned better, was careful to always get enough sleep, to take regular breaks, to make sure at least some of my snacks were healthy (cherry tomatoes are god's gift to the compulsive snacker). Today, apart from a slightly sore wrist, I feel great.
Whether that feeling will persist once I go back and look at what I've written remains to be seen. I do intend to finish a first draft this month, though I'm taking a couple of days off first. If you want to see me actually writing in real time, you can follow me on Twitch.tv, where I've been live-streaming most of my writing for the past few days (disclaimer: at the moment, it's just my Word doc, no webcam or anything, and I've no idea whether it's interesting to watch).
In the meantime, I'm off to look up the definition of 'month'.
Showing posts with label NaNoWriMo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NaNoWriMo. Show all posts
Thursday, 6 November 2014
Monday, 29 October 2012
The NaNoWriMo Naysayers
Or NaNOSayErs, I guess...
They come out of the woodwork this time of year, don't they? Far too many (by which I mean 'more than zero') novelist bloggers put out posts saying that NaNo encourages bad writing, mocks the serious business of prose fiction, creates false expectations, blah blah blah.
I think NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty puts it quite nicely in his history of NaNo on the official website:
These people fail to understand not only fun and hard work, but also writing itself. Yes, writing should be hard, but as the linked post implies, rather like a penis, writing is most fun when it is hard.
And on a more serious note, yes there are times when writing is a slog, when you have to force yourself to crank out another 200 words and it takes an hour or more, but none of this means that writing should never be fun.
Personally, the times when I've worked hardest (and, I should make clear, focussed hardest on the work) at my writing have been the most fun. That's because when I'm working hardest at my writing, I'm being distracted by less and less other stuff, and thus I'm immersing myself much more fully in my stories and their worlds.
And I think immersion is the uniting drive among writers. At base, we're all people who want to live with fictional characters and in fictional worlds (or fictional versions of our own world, which are much the same thing) for part of our lives. In fact, I think it's not just a desire but a need - nothing else explains the devotion that we put into our creations.
Whatever its faults, NaNo is great for immersion. To succeed at NaNo, you need to completely disappear into your own world, to spend your days wrapped up in your characters so that whenever you can grab some keyboard time, they're ready to answer and perform. It forces you to ignore distractions, and thus keeps your writing flowing much more freely.
I actually think that I turn out better first drafts during NaNo than at other times of the year. Why? Because I don't stop every twenty minutes to check Facebook or Twitter, get distracted by something on there and then have to write myself back into the action when I actually get back to writing. Scenes and characterisation flow much better in that kind of context.
All of this is to say nothing of side benefits of NaNo like the opportunity to meet other writers. My long-suffering and saintly beta reader Lynne Hunt is a NaNo buddy, as are a number of my closest friends.
I'm not writing this post because I think NaNo needs defending in and of itself. It's a good time, and substantially less harmful than pretty much any other kind of month-long bender. That needs no defending. But someone seriously needs to shut up the kind of whingy, miserable, short-sighted bloggers who bring up meaningless irrelevancies like the fact that a novel is longer than 50,000 words, or NaNo encouraging bad writing.
NaNo is the most intoxicatingly pure form of the writerly experience that there is. It's not about the result - no first draft is ever much cop - it's about that experience. It's not about what being a career novelist is like, it's about what writing can be like.
Godspeed, NaNoers!
They come out of the woodwork this time of year, don't they? Far too many (by which I mean 'more than zero') novelist bloggers put out posts saying that NaNo encourages bad writing, mocks the serious business of prose fiction, creates false expectations, blah blah blah.
I think NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty puts it quite nicely in his history of NaNo on the official website:
The only word in there I disagree with is the 'rightly' before 'horrified professional writers'. I've certainly seen writers, both professional and amateur, actually arguing that writing shouldn't be fun. This is apparently because writing should always be hard work.
"Fun was a revelation. Novel-writing, we had discovered, was just like watching TV. You get a bunch of friends together, load up on caffeine and junk food, and stare at a glowing screen for a couple hours. And a story spins itself out in front of you.
I think the scene—full of smack-talk and muffin crumbs on our keyboards—would have rightly horrified professional writers. We had taken the cloistered, agonized novel-writing process and transformed it into something that was half literary marathon and half block party."
These people fail to understand not only fun and hard work, but also writing itself. Yes, writing should be hard, but as the linked post implies, rather like a penis, writing is most fun when it is hard.
And on a more serious note, yes there are times when writing is a slog, when you have to force yourself to crank out another 200 words and it takes an hour or more, but none of this means that writing should never be fun.
Personally, the times when I've worked hardest (and, I should make clear, focussed hardest on the work) at my writing have been the most fun. That's because when I'm working hardest at my writing, I'm being distracted by less and less other stuff, and thus I'm immersing myself much more fully in my stories and their worlds.
And I think immersion is the uniting drive among writers. At base, we're all people who want to live with fictional characters and in fictional worlds (or fictional versions of our own world, which are much the same thing) for part of our lives. In fact, I think it's not just a desire but a need - nothing else explains the devotion that we put into our creations.
Whatever its faults, NaNo is great for immersion. To succeed at NaNo, you need to completely disappear into your own world, to spend your days wrapped up in your characters so that whenever you can grab some keyboard time, they're ready to answer and perform. It forces you to ignore distractions, and thus keeps your writing flowing much more freely.
I actually think that I turn out better first drafts during NaNo than at other times of the year. Why? Because I don't stop every twenty minutes to check Facebook or Twitter, get distracted by something on there and then have to write myself back into the action when I actually get back to writing. Scenes and characterisation flow much better in that kind of context.
All of this is to say nothing of side benefits of NaNo like the opportunity to meet other writers. My long-suffering and saintly beta reader Lynne Hunt is a NaNo buddy, as are a number of my closest friends.
I'm not writing this post because I think NaNo needs defending in and of itself. It's a good time, and substantially less harmful than pretty much any other kind of month-long bender. That needs no defending. But someone seriously needs to shut up the kind of whingy, miserable, short-sighted bloggers who bring up meaningless irrelevancies like the fact that a novel is longer than 50,000 words, or NaNo encouraging bad writing.
NaNo is the most intoxicatingly pure form of the writerly experience that there is. It's not about the result - no first draft is ever much cop - it's about that experience. It's not about what being a career novelist is like, it's about what writing can be like.
Godspeed, NaNoers!
Wednesday, 17 October 2012
In case you're wondering where I've been...
This has taken a hundred hours or more to produce (and it's still not finished). Also, term has started up again, and with it my job and my teaching obligations. The last couple of weeks have been pretty crazy, but things are starting to settle down...
And we're a fortnight away from the start of NaNoWriMo (my profile). Time to start preparing? Well, hopefully. It's definitely time to start ignoring people writing blog posts about how NaNo is a waste of time, or stupid, or giving people the wrong ideas about what a novel is, or encouraging people to write crap and then rush it to publication, or any of the other familiar, tiresome drivel that writers with no sense of fun spout at this time of year. The time for those blog posts (and even then, you'll find no such misery here) is *after* NaNo, not before.
Now is the time to focus on actually going for it, and getting the most out of it. I blogged here with some tips on overachieving at NaNo (for those of you who've managed to escape my incessant bragging, I took 8 days over my first NaNo and 7 last year), here with my thoughts on NaNo performance anxiety (and looking back over that post, I'm amused to notice I'm having exactly the same feelings this time around), and here with the epic story of my 2010 NaNo, which neatly summarises everything I love about this event.
When I did my first NaNo, I was too busy for my own good. I was busier last year. I'm busier still this time out - between my two jobs, I'm left with only about two days' worth of free time during the week, whereas last year it was closer to four, and there's a big Halloween bash on Nov 2nd which may well lay me out completely for that weekend. And The Second Realm has, all year, stalwartly resisted my attempts to write it substantially faster than 500 words per day.
This November is going to be brutal. And I'm probably going to love every minute of it. Why? Because it's immersion. I'm going to be living in the world, probably even when I'm at this party (regrettably, The Second Realm offers no particularly good halloween costumes, otherwise I'd be sorted). It's really rewarding to just lose yourself completely in something. The closest I've had to that this year was drafting my thesis over the summer, and that was too much like real work.
Of course, I may snap, or fail (you're free to mock if I fail, but not if I snap), but it will be worth it. NaNo is worth doing. I'd recommend any writer to do it at least once. I don't think you can get a handle on your love of writing unless you've pushed it to extremes, and there's no better extreme than NaNo.
I don't really have much else to say on the point, but I'll maybe see if I can think up some more NaNo tips for next week. Failing that, I hope I'll see you somewhere in November, if and when I come up for air.
In the meantime, here's another plug for my music. Go on, give it a listen. Let me know what you think (politely, please ;D).
And we're a fortnight away from the start of NaNoWriMo (my profile). Time to start preparing? Well, hopefully. It's definitely time to start ignoring people writing blog posts about how NaNo is a waste of time, or stupid, or giving people the wrong ideas about what a novel is, or encouraging people to write crap and then rush it to publication, or any of the other familiar, tiresome drivel that writers with no sense of fun spout at this time of year. The time for those blog posts (and even then, you'll find no such misery here) is *after* NaNo, not before.
Now is the time to focus on actually going for it, and getting the most out of it. I blogged here with some tips on overachieving at NaNo (for those of you who've managed to escape my incessant bragging, I took 8 days over my first NaNo and 7 last year), here with my thoughts on NaNo performance anxiety (and looking back over that post, I'm amused to notice I'm having exactly the same feelings this time around), and here with the epic story of my 2010 NaNo, which neatly summarises everything I love about this event.
When I did my first NaNo, I was too busy for my own good. I was busier last year. I'm busier still this time out - between my two jobs, I'm left with only about two days' worth of free time during the week, whereas last year it was closer to four, and there's a big Halloween bash on Nov 2nd which may well lay me out completely for that weekend. And The Second Realm has, all year, stalwartly resisted my attempts to write it substantially faster than 500 words per day.
This November is going to be brutal. And I'm probably going to love every minute of it. Why? Because it's immersion. I'm going to be living in the world, probably even when I'm at this party (regrettably, The Second Realm offers no particularly good halloween costumes, otherwise I'd be sorted). It's really rewarding to just lose yourself completely in something. The closest I've had to that this year was drafting my thesis over the summer, and that was too much like real work.
Of course, I may snap, or fail (you're free to mock if I fail, but not if I snap), but it will be worth it. NaNo is worth doing. I'd recommend any writer to do it at least once. I don't think you can get a handle on your love of writing unless you've pushed it to extremes, and there's no better extreme than NaNo.
I don't really have much else to say on the point, but I'll maybe see if I can think up some more NaNo tips for next week. Failing that, I hope I'll see you somewhere in November, if and when I come up for air.
In the meantime, here's another plug for my music. Go on, give it a listen. Let me know what you think (politely, please ;D).
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Obligatory Self-congratulation
I completed my NaNoWriMo 50,000 words in about 3 hours shy of 7 days. Finishing the novel (which topped out at about 63,500 words, first draft) took another week, but I polished that off on Monday.
Rather than dwell overlong on how awesome I am (which I do a lot of, I know...), I thought I'd share the secrets of how I did it. If nothing else, I want a record of them for next year, but I hope I can offer some help to people still struggling through this year's challenge too.
1: You've got to have the time.
Unfortunately, we writers can't control the real world the same way we can our fictional worlds. It doesn't matter if you can write at 5,000 words an hour; if you've only got a half-hour every day for writing, it's still going to take you twenty days to write your 50k.
I write at an average of about 800-900 words an hour (which is about average for human beings), so I need about 60 hours of focussed writing time to do my 50k. There are 168 hours in a week; I knew going into NaNo that I was going to need over a third of the available hours to meet my goal of completing in a week.
If you want to complete NaNo fast, this is the sum you have to do. Fortunately for me (or not, if you look at it from a bank manager's point of view), I've got very few hours at work at the moment - only 9 a week - and few other obligations that couldn't be put down for a week. Assuming I wanted to sleep 8 hours a night (in the end, I pulled an all-nighter on the Sunday night to enable me to finish in time), 60 hours' writing time leaves me with 43 hours in the week for doing everything else.
Everything else means obvious things like personal hygeine and shopping, but also plenty of activities linked to the writing. It might be 6 hours per day, but that vanishes pretty quickly.
2: Know Thyself
When picking music to write to, I don't look for music that suits the mood of what I'm writing. I pick the music I most want to listen to at the time. Why? Because that makes me more reluctant to turn it off to, for example, watch frivolous videos on YouTube.
I'm not making a recommendation for how to pick music to write to. My point is that I know I can fix my fingers to the keyboard more firmly by choosing music in a particular way (this NaNo, it ended up being 20-odd Blind Guardian tracks on endless repeat - I make no apologies). I also knew going in that I had to avoid any urban walk of longer than about 4 miles in one go, because the combination of mild dehydration and fatigue from that would leave my brain too frazzled to write for at least an hour. So, I got pretty much all my food shopping for the week out of the way on October 31st.
NaNoWriMo is not a time to fight these little foibles (however pathetic it might be to be turned into a useless lump by an hour's walking). Figure out what your quirks are and plan accordingly. Can't write without infusions of coffee at hourly intervals? Better make sure to buy an extra jar before November. Need to feel angsty, alienated, and disgusted by humanity in order to find your muse? Buy Snooki's autobiography... (Note: I've not read it, and she may be a literary genius. The nature of blogging just makes sniping at easy targets almost inevitable. No slander intended.)
3. Maintain Your Arsenal
You're trying to write a novel in a hurry. That means you can't afford to spend too much time sitting staring into space looking for inspiration. Whether you're an outline writer or strictly seat-of-the-pants, I'd recommend keeping at least a rough list of cool ideas that you might put in. Start noting stuff down sometime in September and keep the list to hand. Every time you find yourself staring off into space in November, the first thing you do is check the list.
It's not going to help every time. But sometimes 'wombat crashes through window, followed by bad guy' is exactly the twist you need. (There are no wombats in my NaNo novel. Unless you like wombats, in which case, buy my book, it's got wombats! ¬_¬)
4. Your Friends Will Not Understand
For one week, it's okay to ignore them. Sometime on November 6th (I think), I put a note on my Facebook about my progress, and someone responded with 'I don't think you quite understand the concept of a month.'
It's a fair comment and made me laugh, but it didn't make me stop writing. Nor did the housemate who, as the week went on, got steadily more worried by my apparent descent into insane obsession. You have to be crazy to want to do NaNo anyway; if people start looking at you like you're even crazier, just leave them be. You can convince them of your rationality later. All that matters right now is word count. Except...
5. None of it Really Matters
You're doing NaNo for your own benefit. To prove you can do it. To crack the block on that pesky back-burner project. For the thrill. For a holiday (which is how I described it to my PhD supervisor).
If you find yourself well short of whatever goal you've set yourself by day 5, don't beat yourself up over it. Always keep in mind that it's OK to fail, to fall short. You're not negotiating a Middle East peace treaty. You're not trying to develop a cure for AIDS. You're doing a completely frivolous, spurious writing contest where victory is the exclusive province of lunatics. You've then imposed on top of that an even more spurious target to put you in a crowd with lunatics even the lunatics think are lunatics.
The lunatic-lunatics like me have fun with it. We get a rush from the total immersion and the grueling drive. There is no shame in not being one of us. Above all, there's no reason to get stressed about joining our company.
NaNo is a competition without prizes. Do it your way.
---
I have no idea if any of that has been helpful at all. Maybe it's more about planning for next year than winning through this year. Good luck to y'all, and don't forget to throw a donation the way of the Office of Letters and Light to make sure there *is* a next year!
On an unrelated note, due to some tweaks to my plans for the rest of the Non-Agency trilogy, I've dropped the price of 'Heaven Can Wait' to 99c/75p. The changes have already gone through at Smashwords and should resolve at Amazon sometime tomorrow (Amazon have already bunged a big discount on it, for some reason). Buy it! I promise it's good!
(no wombats, mind)
Rather than dwell overlong on how awesome I am (which I do a lot of, I know...), I thought I'd share the secrets of how I did it. If nothing else, I want a record of them for next year, but I hope I can offer some help to people still struggling through this year's challenge too.
1: You've got to have the time.
Unfortunately, we writers can't control the real world the same way we can our fictional worlds. It doesn't matter if you can write at 5,000 words an hour; if you've only got a half-hour every day for writing, it's still going to take you twenty days to write your 50k.
I write at an average of about 800-900 words an hour (which is about average for human beings), so I need about 60 hours of focussed writing time to do my 50k. There are 168 hours in a week; I knew going into NaNo that I was going to need over a third of the available hours to meet my goal of completing in a week.
If you want to complete NaNo fast, this is the sum you have to do. Fortunately for me (or not, if you look at it from a bank manager's point of view), I've got very few hours at work at the moment - only 9 a week - and few other obligations that couldn't be put down for a week. Assuming I wanted to sleep 8 hours a night (in the end, I pulled an all-nighter on the Sunday night to enable me to finish in time), 60 hours' writing time leaves me with 43 hours in the week for doing everything else.
Everything else means obvious things like personal hygeine and shopping, but also plenty of activities linked to the writing. It might be 6 hours per day, but that vanishes pretty quickly.
2: Know Thyself
When picking music to write to, I don't look for music that suits the mood of what I'm writing. I pick the music I most want to listen to at the time. Why? Because that makes me more reluctant to turn it off to, for example, watch frivolous videos on YouTube.
I'm not making a recommendation for how to pick music to write to. My point is that I know I can fix my fingers to the keyboard more firmly by choosing music in a particular way (this NaNo, it ended up being 20-odd Blind Guardian tracks on endless repeat - I make no apologies). I also knew going in that I had to avoid any urban walk of longer than about 4 miles in one go, because the combination of mild dehydration and fatigue from that would leave my brain too frazzled to write for at least an hour. So, I got pretty much all my food shopping for the week out of the way on October 31st.
NaNoWriMo is not a time to fight these little foibles (however pathetic it might be to be turned into a useless lump by an hour's walking). Figure out what your quirks are and plan accordingly. Can't write without infusions of coffee at hourly intervals? Better make sure to buy an extra jar before November. Need to feel angsty, alienated, and disgusted by humanity in order to find your muse? Buy Snooki's autobiography... (Note: I've not read it, and she may be a literary genius. The nature of blogging just makes sniping at easy targets almost inevitable. No slander intended.)
3. Maintain Your Arsenal
You're trying to write a novel in a hurry. That means you can't afford to spend too much time sitting staring into space looking for inspiration. Whether you're an outline writer or strictly seat-of-the-pants, I'd recommend keeping at least a rough list of cool ideas that you might put in. Start noting stuff down sometime in September and keep the list to hand. Every time you find yourself staring off into space in November, the first thing you do is check the list.
It's not going to help every time. But sometimes 'wombat crashes through window, followed by bad guy' is exactly the twist you need. (There are no wombats in my NaNo novel. Unless you like wombats, in which case, buy my book, it's got wombats! ¬_¬)
4. Your Friends Will Not Understand
For one week, it's okay to ignore them. Sometime on November 6th (I think), I put a note on my Facebook about my progress, and someone responded with 'I don't think you quite understand the concept of a month.'
It's a fair comment and made me laugh, but it didn't make me stop writing. Nor did the housemate who, as the week went on, got steadily more worried by my apparent descent into insane obsession. You have to be crazy to want to do NaNo anyway; if people start looking at you like you're even crazier, just leave them be. You can convince them of your rationality later. All that matters right now is word count. Except...
5. None of it Really Matters
You're doing NaNo for your own benefit. To prove you can do it. To crack the block on that pesky back-burner project. For the thrill. For a holiday (which is how I described it to my PhD supervisor).
If you find yourself well short of whatever goal you've set yourself by day 5, don't beat yourself up over it. Always keep in mind that it's OK to fail, to fall short. You're not negotiating a Middle East peace treaty. You're not trying to develop a cure for AIDS. You're doing a completely frivolous, spurious writing contest where victory is the exclusive province of lunatics. You've then imposed on top of that an even more spurious target to put you in a crowd with lunatics even the lunatics think are lunatics.
The lunatic-lunatics like me have fun with it. We get a rush from the total immersion and the grueling drive. There is no shame in not being one of us. Above all, there's no reason to get stressed about joining our company.
NaNo is a competition without prizes. Do it your way.
---
I have no idea if any of that has been helpful at all. Maybe it's more about planning for next year than winning through this year. Good luck to y'all, and don't forget to throw a donation the way of the Office of Letters and Light to make sure there *is* a next year!
On an unrelated note, due to some tweaks to my plans for the rest of the Non-Agency trilogy, I've dropped the price of 'Heaven Can Wait' to 99c/75p. The changes have already gone through at Smashwords and should resolve at Amazon sometime tomorrow (Amazon have already bunged a big discount on it, for some reason). Buy it! I promise it's good!
(no wombats, mind)
Monday, 31 October 2011
A Secret Fear
Okay, it's not going to be so secret after this post, obviously. That's more or less the point; expose the %$&*er and hope it goes away.
So here goes:
I'm terrified of this year's NaNo. I have been for some months. Last year went so perfectly and was so much fun that I know this year can't measure up. I'm terrified that the spontaneity NaNo requires will either elude me or cripple my particular project. I'm terrified that I'll start goofing off and playing videogames instead of writing. That I'll find I'm inadequate to the task this time around (particularly embarrassing given my oft-stated intent to break my last year's time of 8 days to 50k). I'm terrified that the struggle of pushing through writing that fast will make me hate it, hate the project, and hurt my love for writing. I'm terrified that competitiveness will get the better of me and I'll annoy all my friends.
In short, I'm terrified that last year was beginner's luck.
A certain amount of it was, of course. 'Bad Romance' as a project really suited NaNo and it just so happened to come along at the right moment. There wasn't time for a lot of outlining so I was able to really go where the story took me. I was able, one way or another, to avoid anyone in authority notiving just how much I was shunning my PhD.
The mature thing to do, naturally, would be to calm down and stop hanging so much on NaNo. Stop obsessing over it and just write. If you know me at all, though, you know I have very little control over my fixations, so maturity is out the window (and let's be honest, that's where it belongs. Mature people don't do NaNo, and it's entirely legitimate to hate them for it XD).
Of course, quite apart from NaNo, I've written three other novels, and the longest I spent on the first draft of any of them was five weeks, so I know I can do it (I've written over 300,000 words in the 12 months since November 1st 2010). Binge-writing suits me when it comes to novels - weirdly, it seems not to with episodes of The Second Realm, even though they're much shorter.
And I do care about my NaNo project (the third book of The Non-Agency, 'Don't Fear the Reaper'), even given how much I screwed up the second book in the trilogy by rushing it. I have a better idea of where I'm going with this one, it's a simpler story, and it's got the grand climax at the end to look forward to (and boy, am I looking forward to it).
So there are weights on both sides of the good/bad scales. I've been shockingly negligent of preparation, though, and while I have a pretty good idea of the essentials of the plot of DFTR I haven't done anything like the in-depth planning that I did for 'Some Kind of Angel'. My biggest worry is the fact that I don't know what the first line's going to be. I intend to start work over breakfast tomorrow morning, just to break the dam, but I'm worried I'll find myself staring at a blank Word doc until I'm late for work.
The worry is getting up to speed. NaNo is all about momentum, and there should be fewer obstacles to my momentum this year than last - provided I can keep away from videogames for a week or two. If I can get some momentum up early on I'll be fine - the main meat of DFTR is a fairly classic fantasy adventure which brings together a couple of ideas I've been dying to turn into a novel for about fifteen years - but there's a 10-12,000-word chunk at the start of setup for that which is mainly full of stuff I suck at.
My goal, then, is to break the back of that before the end of Wednesday. Given how much time I have available in the next two days, even 12,000 words should only be around 600 words an hour, which is about what I do when I'm struggling with chunky stuff. That leaves 5 days of 7,500ish words a day of action and adventure (and one very surly nun) to get me to 50k in 7 days. Tough going, but nothing I've not managed before.
The most important thing, the thing that gives me most hope, though, is that the NaNo website has finally restored functionality for buddies (so I've got lots of people to compare myself to either when I need a poke in the competitive instinct or a stroke to my ego ;D) and that automated graph of your own wordcount against the target (I lived by that thing last year).
Y'know, I'm not as terrified as I was when I started writing this. Success! Here's hoping November is as successful.
Happy NaNoing!
So here goes:
I'm terrified of this year's NaNo. I have been for some months. Last year went so perfectly and was so much fun that I know this year can't measure up. I'm terrified that the spontaneity NaNo requires will either elude me or cripple my particular project. I'm terrified that I'll start goofing off and playing videogames instead of writing. That I'll find I'm inadequate to the task this time around (particularly embarrassing given my oft-stated intent to break my last year's time of 8 days to 50k). I'm terrified that the struggle of pushing through writing that fast will make me hate it, hate the project, and hurt my love for writing. I'm terrified that competitiveness will get the better of me and I'll annoy all my friends.
In short, I'm terrified that last year was beginner's luck.
A certain amount of it was, of course. 'Bad Romance' as a project really suited NaNo and it just so happened to come along at the right moment. There wasn't time for a lot of outlining so I was able to really go where the story took me. I was able, one way or another, to avoid anyone in authority notiving just how much I was shunning my PhD.
The mature thing to do, naturally, would be to calm down and stop hanging so much on NaNo. Stop obsessing over it and just write. If you know me at all, though, you know I have very little control over my fixations, so maturity is out the window (and let's be honest, that's where it belongs. Mature people don't do NaNo, and it's entirely legitimate to hate them for it XD).
Of course, quite apart from NaNo, I've written three other novels, and the longest I spent on the first draft of any of them was five weeks, so I know I can do it (I've written over 300,000 words in the 12 months since November 1st 2010). Binge-writing suits me when it comes to novels - weirdly, it seems not to with episodes of The Second Realm, even though they're much shorter.
And I do care about my NaNo project (the third book of The Non-Agency, 'Don't Fear the Reaper'), even given how much I screwed up the second book in the trilogy by rushing it. I have a better idea of where I'm going with this one, it's a simpler story, and it's got the grand climax at the end to look forward to (and boy, am I looking forward to it).
So there are weights on both sides of the good/bad scales. I've been shockingly negligent of preparation, though, and while I have a pretty good idea of the essentials of the plot of DFTR I haven't done anything like the in-depth planning that I did for 'Some Kind of Angel'. My biggest worry is the fact that I don't know what the first line's going to be. I intend to start work over breakfast tomorrow morning, just to break the dam, but I'm worried I'll find myself staring at a blank Word doc until I'm late for work.
The worry is getting up to speed. NaNo is all about momentum, and there should be fewer obstacles to my momentum this year than last - provided I can keep away from videogames for a week or two. If I can get some momentum up early on I'll be fine - the main meat of DFTR is a fairly classic fantasy adventure which brings together a couple of ideas I've been dying to turn into a novel for about fifteen years - but there's a 10-12,000-word chunk at the start of setup for that which is mainly full of stuff I suck at.
My goal, then, is to break the back of that before the end of Wednesday. Given how much time I have available in the next two days, even 12,000 words should only be around 600 words an hour, which is about what I do when I'm struggling with chunky stuff. That leaves 5 days of 7,500ish words a day of action and adventure (and one very surly nun) to get me to 50k in 7 days. Tough going, but nothing I've not managed before.
The most important thing, the thing that gives me most hope, though, is that the NaNo website has finally restored functionality for buddies (so I've got lots of people to compare myself to either when I need a poke in the competitive instinct or a stroke to my ego ;D) and that automated graph of your own wordcount against the target (I lived by that thing last year).
Y'know, I'm not as terrified as I was when I started writing this. Success! Here's hoping November is as successful.
Happy NaNoing!
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
The best decision I ever made.
Well, okay, I can't remember every decision I've ever made, but if it wasn't the best it was close.
What decision, Rik?! I hear you indignantly cry. Stop clarifying and write your damn blog post!
You people spoil all the fun.
The decision I'm talking about is the one I made to participate in NaNoWriMo 2010 last year. As I'm about to celebrate the one-year anniversary of that decision (and everything that came with it) by repeating the process, I thought it might be a good time to look back.
To recap, then. It's mid-October 2010. I'm just over a year into my PhD and starting to realise that it's pointless and tedious (that's another blog post, one so unbearably wangsty I'll probably spare you altogether). It's two months since I almost quit my band. My webcomic is sliding slowly back towards hiatus. My personal life is a mess (although, arguably, no worse than normal). I've just gone back to work - I work term-time only for universities - and am busy as all hell.
A niggling idea for a novel about the Lady Gaga phenomenon plants itself in my brain after a lecture I attended which included a screening of the 'Alejandro' and 'Bad Romance' videos. And I think, 'Hey, NaNoWriMo is next month.'
Oh, what the hell, go on then, I'll give it a go. I need to shake things up a bit.
I signed up for NaNo and my local regional chapter, and joined Twitter to keep track of things. I went to an introductory meet (and probably made a bit of an ass of myself - fewer of those present were nerds than I was expecting). Then, Monday November 1st rolled round. I started writing, just a couple of hundred words, over breakfast, to make sure I didn't bottle out of starting.
Monday was a busy day; I was out of the house at half eight to go to work at one job, then back for a quick lunch before dashing out for the three-mile walk to the other job. Then I went and grabbed a couple of hours in the university library, ploughing through the opening scenes of 'Bad Romance', before going to the kick-off party, where I did hardly any writing but did meet a bunch of cool folks.
The best moment of the kick-off party was when one of my then-still-fairly-new housemates who I didn't know very well walked in and we spent an awkward ten minutes explaining how it was that we'd managed to live in the same building without knowing each other had signed up.
By the end of Monday, I was a little ahead of target, on around 2,500 words. So far so good, I thought.
Tuesday, I had the day off. To my surprise, I spent the entire day writing and finished up on around 8,000 words. Looking back, the bug had already bitten, I just hadn't realised. Wednesday went similarly after I got out of work at lunchtime. I think I was somewhere around 15,000 by Thursday, the day of the second write-in.
Thursday I worked all day, with barely ten minutes for writing at lunchtime. Then I went to the meet and met (dun-dun-dun) my nemesis. Sometime during Wednesday, I'd started pacing myself by a user on the Liverpool forum who had always been just slightly ahead of me. This person was at the write-in, at which she managed to write about three times as much as me (I got too distracted talking to people), but let's just say there was some smack-talking, everlasting enmity was declared, and on Friday we went mad.
Friday, again, I wasn't working. My nemesis was, but she still stayed well ahead. Still, by the end of the day we were both closing on the half-way mark. I don't really remember the weekend, except that I'm sure I spent Saturday at band practice and barely managed the basic 1,667 words. Somehow, though, we were both past the 40,000-word mark by Monday. I was a few thousand behind.
Monday, of course, was mental. I squeezed in all the writing I could and skipped the write-in so that I actually got some writing in that evening. Still, as the evening wore on, I remained 4,000 words adrift as my nemesis powered towards 50,000.
But time was on my side. I didn't work Tuesdays. My nemesis did. She called it a night, reluctantly, finally, at about 10PM. On only 48,000 words.
I was at 44,000. 6k to go. No need to get up the following morning. I made a quick supply run (energy drinks, biscuits, high-octane candy and some fresh orange juice - which, and I can't stress this enough, is the most essential component of any all-nighter supplies) and settled in.
And I wrote until 4AM, when I crossed the 50k mark. I was unfortunately soundly asleep by the time my nemesis woke up at around 5 to a message from me. I'll admit to a little gloating (only a little, mind - I knew she'd only respond by telling me she let me win).
Start-to-finish, I reached 50k in under 192 hours (8 days). I was the 3rd person in the Liverpool region to finish (we have a couple of those irritating finish-in-two-days *&%@ers or I'd have been first ;D). I was in love.
No, not like that. With writing, doofus. The story of my nemesis and I came to a rather less satisfactory ending, one that I wouldn't share with a public blog (hence the withholding of her name).
The point is this; I've always told stories. Since my early teens, I've always been writing some project or other, be it novels, screenplays or webcomics. But university life hadn't left me enough time to practice writing except for the merciless demands of that damned webcomic, which by late 2010 was on its last legs.
NaNo gave me eight days of the most intense writerly experience of my life, and I loved it. My NaNo didn't actually finish that Tuesday - 'Bad Romance' eventually topped out at about 67,000 words, and I kept up the 1,700-a-day until I reached that point, and even after that I kept going to meets and things - but it was those eight days that told me what I wanted to do with my life.
The results one year on are dramatic; I don't just mean that I'm now a published author, either. I finally left the band for good last month (I'm going to their first gig without me on Thursday, and looking forward to it now that I'm free of the stress of playing). I killed the webcomic for good back in July. I couldn't get rid of the PhD that easily - the best way to get free of it is just to push ahead and finish as quickly as possible - but I'm more or less up to the half-way point of the work, and hoping to do most of the rest in the oncoming year. I've even more or less sorted out my personal life.
Most importantly, I know where I'm going. I've found what I want to do with my life. I think that's something that's even more important for writers than it is for 'normal people' (;D). Writing is my life now, and everything else (even my music) is secondary. My every effort is directed towards freeing myself from day-jobs and similar obligations.
I haven't even gotten started on how good my experience of my first year on Twitter has been (another massive debt I owe to NaNo), but this post is starting to get a bit long, so I'll wrap it up now.
So, thank you, NaNoWriMo. Thank you, Chris Baty and Lindsay Grant. Thank you, Liverpool regional chapter.
Bring on November!
What decision, Rik?! I hear you indignantly cry. Stop clarifying and write your damn blog post!
You people spoil all the fun.
The decision I'm talking about is the one I made to participate in NaNoWriMo 2010 last year. As I'm about to celebrate the one-year anniversary of that decision (and everything that came with it) by repeating the process, I thought it might be a good time to look back.
To recap, then. It's mid-October 2010. I'm just over a year into my PhD and starting to realise that it's pointless and tedious (that's another blog post, one so unbearably wangsty I'll probably spare you altogether). It's two months since I almost quit my band. My webcomic is sliding slowly back towards hiatus. My personal life is a mess (although, arguably, no worse than normal). I've just gone back to work - I work term-time only for universities - and am busy as all hell.
A niggling idea for a novel about the Lady Gaga phenomenon plants itself in my brain after a lecture I attended which included a screening of the 'Alejandro' and 'Bad Romance' videos. And I think, 'Hey, NaNoWriMo is next month.'
Oh, what the hell, go on then, I'll give it a go. I need to shake things up a bit.
I signed up for NaNo and my local regional chapter, and joined Twitter to keep track of things. I went to an introductory meet (and probably made a bit of an ass of myself - fewer of those present were nerds than I was expecting). Then, Monday November 1st rolled round. I started writing, just a couple of hundred words, over breakfast, to make sure I didn't bottle out of starting.
Monday was a busy day; I was out of the house at half eight to go to work at one job, then back for a quick lunch before dashing out for the three-mile walk to the other job. Then I went and grabbed a couple of hours in the university library, ploughing through the opening scenes of 'Bad Romance', before going to the kick-off party, where I did hardly any writing but did meet a bunch of cool folks.
The best moment of the kick-off party was when one of my then-still-fairly-new housemates who I didn't know very well walked in and we spent an awkward ten minutes explaining how it was that we'd managed to live in the same building without knowing each other had signed up.
By the end of Monday, I was a little ahead of target, on around 2,500 words. So far so good, I thought.
Tuesday, I had the day off. To my surprise, I spent the entire day writing and finished up on around 8,000 words. Looking back, the bug had already bitten, I just hadn't realised. Wednesday went similarly after I got out of work at lunchtime. I think I was somewhere around 15,000 by Thursday, the day of the second write-in.
Thursday I worked all day, with barely ten minutes for writing at lunchtime. Then I went to the meet and met (dun-dun-dun) my nemesis. Sometime during Wednesday, I'd started pacing myself by a user on the Liverpool forum who had always been just slightly ahead of me. This person was at the write-in, at which she managed to write about three times as much as me (I got too distracted talking to people), but let's just say there was some smack-talking, everlasting enmity was declared, and on Friday we went mad.
Friday, again, I wasn't working. My nemesis was, but she still stayed well ahead. Still, by the end of the day we were both closing on the half-way mark. I don't really remember the weekend, except that I'm sure I spent Saturday at band practice and barely managed the basic 1,667 words. Somehow, though, we were both past the 40,000-word mark by Monday. I was a few thousand behind.
Monday, of course, was mental. I squeezed in all the writing I could and skipped the write-in so that I actually got some writing in that evening. Still, as the evening wore on, I remained 4,000 words adrift as my nemesis powered towards 50,000.
But time was on my side. I didn't work Tuesdays. My nemesis did. She called it a night, reluctantly, finally, at about 10PM. On only 48,000 words.
I was at 44,000. 6k to go. No need to get up the following morning. I made a quick supply run (energy drinks, biscuits, high-octane candy and some fresh orange juice - which, and I can't stress this enough, is the most essential component of any all-nighter supplies) and settled in.
And I wrote until 4AM, when I crossed the 50k mark. I was unfortunately soundly asleep by the time my nemesis woke up at around 5 to a message from me. I'll admit to a little gloating (only a little, mind - I knew she'd only respond by telling me she let me win).
Start-to-finish, I reached 50k in under 192 hours (8 days). I was the 3rd person in the Liverpool region to finish (we have a couple of those irritating finish-in-two-days *&%@ers or I'd have been first ;D). I was in love.
No, not like that. With writing, doofus. The story of my nemesis and I came to a rather less satisfactory ending, one that I wouldn't share with a public blog (hence the withholding of her name).
The point is this; I've always told stories. Since my early teens, I've always been writing some project or other, be it novels, screenplays or webcomics. But university life hadn't left me enough time to practice writing except for the merciless demands of that damned webcomic, which by late 2010 was on its last legs.
NaNo gave me eight days of the most intense writerly experience of my life, and I loved it. My NaNo didn't actually finish that Tuesday - 'Bad Romance' eventually topped out at about 67,000 words, and I kept up the 1,700-a-day until I reached that point, and even after that I kept going to meets and things - but it was those eight days that told me what I wanted to do with my life.
The results one year on are dramatic; I don't just mean that I'm now a published author, either. I finally left the band for good last month (I'm going to their first gig without me on Thursday, and looking forward to it now that I'm free of the stress of playing). I killed the webcomic for good back in July. I couldn't get rid of the PhD that easily - the best way to get free of it is just to push ahead and finish as quickly as possible - but I'm more or less up to the half-way point of the work, and hoping to do most of the rest in the oncoming year. I've even more or less sorted out my personal life.
Most importantly, I know where I'm going. I've found what I want to do with my life. I think that's something that's even more important for writers than it is for 'normal people' (;D). Writing is my life now, and everything else (even my music) is secondary. My every effort is directed towards freeing myself from day-jobs and similar obligations.
I haven't even gotten started on how good my experience of my first year on Twitter has been (another massive debt I owe to NaNo), but this post is starting to get a bit long, so I'll wrap it up now.
So, thank you, NaNoWriMo. Thank you, Chris Baty and Lindsay Grant. Thank you, Liverpool regional chapter.
Bring on November!
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