First a couple of announcements and links.
This is the last week to apply for the Odyssey Workshop class on worldbuilding that I will be teaching in January. The sign-up page is at https://odysseyworkshop.org/worldbuilding.html; there are also some posts at https://www.facebook.com/OdysseyWorkshop, https://twitter.com/OdysseyWorkshop, and https://www.instagram.com/odysseyworkshop/.
And I had a lovely long interview with Edward Willett at the Worldshapers Podcast, which is now live at https://theworldshapers.com/2020/11/29/episode-71-patricia-c-wrede/ We had so much fun chatting that we ran over our time – it’s an hour and twenty minutes.
On to the post.
NaNoWriMo is over, during which many thousands of people tried to finish a 50,000 word novel by writing 1,667 words, on average, every day for the entire month of November. Quite a few of them succeeded.
How did they do it?
There are hundreds of good websites that advise people on how to produce a fifty thousand word novel in one month. Most divide their advice into two categories – the prewriting (coming up with an idea, creating and fleshing out characters, making outlines from the general two-page summary to a scene-by-scene breakdown, figuring out the structure), and the writing month itself (find a rhythm, pace yourself, front-load your production, only stop when you know what happens next, be disciplined, make it routine).
None of those are bad bits of advice for any sort of writing. All of them are things that various professional writers do regularly (though in my experience, few expect to write fifty thousand words in only a month). The thing is, they don’t work for every writer, not even for every NaNo writer.
NaNoWriMo is the ultimate burst writing challenge. It works the way writing last-minute college term papers worked – there’s a clear deadline, an equally clear production rate, and a limited amount of time left. Most important, I think, is the awareness that there’s a penalty for missing a day’s work. If you skip the first day, you have to make up 1,667 words over the next twenty-nine days, which means you have to write an extra fifty-seven words every day.
And the penalty keeps going up – if you miss the fifteenth day, you only have fifteen days left to make up the difference, so you have to write a hundred and eleven more words every day from then on. And if you skip the next-to-last day, you have to write twice as many words on the final day, or 3,334 words, to get to the fifty thousand word goal.
All that encourages writers never to skip a day. And when they write every day, quite a few of them successfully get to the fifty thousand word goal.
I am not one of them.
I tried NaNoWriMo once, just for the heck of it. I lasted three days. Sixteen hundred words a day is roughly six times what I think of as my normal production rate, which averages about 250 words a day (when life and pandemics and things aren’t getting in the way). I can write sixteen hundred words in one day, on occasion, but forcing it day after day burns me out extremely quickly.
I am not a burst writer. I am a plodder. Two hundred and fifty words is about one standard manuscript page, which is pretty minimal when you think about it. But two hundred and fifty words a day, every day, for three hundred days gets me a 75,000 word first draft, or a book a year if I take Sundays and holidays off. (Usually, my novel manuscripts are longer than that, but I don’t allow for “barn door syndrome” when I figure my average per-day word count.)
If there is a secret to being a professional writer, this is it – and it is one of the worst-kept secrets in the history of the world. At least ninety percent of the professional writers I know talk about writing every day, whether they feel like it or not, whether the day’s writing consists of four hours agonizing production of two sentences (or worse, the deletion of half a chapter), or whether it’s an inspired five-page sprint.
Even people I know are burst writers talk about showing up to look at their manuscript, or at least their notes or research, every day. Or they’re complaining to other writer-friends about how they did 10,000 words last week, and this week they aren’t getting anything and it is sooo frustrating. (I am actually sympathetic to such complaints. My high numbers are not so high, but I am just as susceptible to thinking “And if I could just do that much every day/week/month, I could finish X-many books per year!”)
The point is that every writer I know does something writing related pretty much every day … and “something” is, most frequently, showing up at the page. Because no matter what kind of writer you are, one thing is still true: you have to get words down on the page at some point. Just typing up a 100,000 word manuscript at an average typing speed would take thirty hours of steady non-stop typing. That means that at some point, every writer has to show up for at least that many hours – and of course, that doesn’t include time spent making stuff up, correcting typos, or stopping to hunt for the right word. Or breaks for sleeping, eating, and other necessities of life.
The first rule of writing is, you have to write. And to do that, you have to show up at the page.
Show up at the page every day.
It is simple.
It is NOT easy.
It can’t be avoided.
And I haven’t been doing it. :o(
> And I haven’t been doing it. :o(
Me too! Computer/website stuff, in my case. 🙁
NaWriMo is wonderful in that you are participating in something with thousands of people all over the world. It imbues your consciousness that, yes, you can put A Whole Lot Of Words down on paper.
I challenged a friend to join NaNoWRiMo, which ultimately resulted in his publishing four novels that likely otherwise would not have seen the light of day.
I participated three or four years, but I ultimately dropped out because it became for me just a challenge to find longer ways to say something, a matter of quantity of quality. I didn’t burn out, finding 1600 words a day a somewhat comfortable push; but I got a lot more wordy and rambling.
show up at the page
I found that looking at my mss whenever I sit down at the computer or get up from it nets me a sentence here and there and keeps the story alive. No pressure to write, just saying hi to my characters.
I _eventually_ made 50K last year (first attempt: 2003) and unlike previous years, they were good words (previous attempts: characters talking in white rooms, easy scenes that carried little weight, and *still* topped out at 30K). A lot of things came together that probably will never happen at the same time again, including being able to clear the decks of everything else for a whole month. (In the Year of the Plague 2020, I refused to even sign up.)
For a very long time chasing word count was bad for me, so I wholeheartedly want to second Pat’s advice to show up, and don’t stress over wordcount. Last year’s novel? I stopped working on it in February, and have not had the brain to pick it up again.
My intention this year was to write two stories to make sure it hit the 50,000 mark.
Turns out both together hit 37,500. Oh, well, counting it a half-win.
I listened to the Worldshapers interview last night and enjoyed it very much! Now I’m dying to know: what are the three books that started from the same idea seed and went in different directions?
I’ve done NaNo seriously twice, and “won” both times. But even when I was churning out the full 50K, writing every day was a no-go for me; I burn out as bad on that as others might on the sheer quantity. Three or four days off during the month was absolutely mandatory, and longer-term sustainability would need two or three times that.
However, I could stand to write a lot closer to every day than I have been. I’ve been terrible about showing up at the page lately (like, for the past two years), and yeah, shockingly, not much gets done.
It works the way writing last-minute college term papers worked
That’s it exactly, and that explains why NaNo has worked for me in the past, since I largely credit my college degree to the term-paper all-nighter. 😉
And it explains why doing a sort of NaNo-lite doesn’t work as well. This year, my goal was simply to get the book I started in 2018 moving again. And it sort of worked; I’ve gotten a few thousand new words down, which got me past the tedious transitional bit I left things at, and the story is more or less “booted up” in my brain again. But without that aaaaaaaahsomanywords screaming intensity, it’s far too easy for me to let other things take up my time.
“I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.”
―Duke Ellington (1899–1974)
A deadline, and someone to witness it. Deadlines and practical targets work really well for me, but if nobody but me notices or cares if I meet it, it doesn’t really count as a deadline.
> if nobody but me notices or cares…
I swear the worst thing to do to a writer is leave them in a vacuum. Feedback and reactions are the breath of life.
Lord, yes, this. So nice to know it’s not just me.
Back in the 1990s, when I was Bard of the Mists and had the duty to write songs or poems on any topic suggested by my Prince, I had a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon posted beside my desk. Originally it read:
Hobbes: Have you finished your paper yet”
Calvin: No, I’m waiting for the necessary…
Hobbes: Inspiration?
Calvin: Panic.
Only I had whited out “paper” and written in “song.”
Never underestimate the value of panic. I wrote one song between noon and evening Court, and another between dawn and Invocation (around 10 AM).