How I Spent My Nano Vacation
How I Spent My Nano Vacation
In October 2012, I was somewhat wearily embarking on the umpteenth revision of my novel in progress when my protagonist zigged even though the current draft kind of revolved around his zagging. A mature response would have been to feel grateful that I’d spied the flaw and set to whistling while I began reworking the book…again.
Instead, I gave my laptop the finger.
But, really, who could blame me?
If you counted all the time from the first moment the idea for that novel came to me, though the years I desperately tried to convince myself I didn’t really want to write the book at all, through the years it took to write the first draft, and finally through all the years spanning more revisions than I could count, I’d been working on that book for a grand total of ten years. Ten very, very long years, so I was antsy to explore other characters and other plots. And though I’d scratched that itch by dabbling in flash fiction, I’d developed a bit of a backlog of novel ideas I was eager to explore. Is it any wonder my response to a revelation that would throw me into yet another draft was to flip the whole project the bird?
Clearly, I needed a vacation.
And given that November was mere weeks away, I made a deal with myself: If I finished a detailed revision plan for my novel in progress by October 31, this would be the year I allowed myself to dive into a NaNoWriMo project.
According to the NaNoWriMo web site, “National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 50,000-word (approximately 175-page) novel by 11:59:59 PM on November 30.”
Looking at my backlog of ideas, I decided not to choose the idea that was most fully formed, but a premise that was intriguing to me that I wasn’t sure had teeth. By choosing to write a book I wasn’t sure about, I was hoping to more easily avoid my censors as I put words down and determined whether the itch of the idea was something I would want to keep scratching after the first draft.
I’m happy to report that I learned this new idea is absolutely an itch I want to keep scratching—somewhere near mid November, I decided to change my goal to finishing a complete first draft, even if—as it was becoming clear—that might mean going well beyond the fifty-thousand word minimum. Needless to say, my first NaNoWriMo experience was a crazy month full of writerly lessons, including:
First drafts should be quick. The first draft of the novel in progress that spent November in a drawer took me 3 years and 923 pages to write. The first draft of the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo took me 30 days and 199 pages to write. While it’s true that one day after I finished my nano novel, my critic was already asking me why I bothered to detour down this narrative dead end and how I could possibly leave out this or that scene, at the end of the month I did have a full novel-length story to work from when (when!) I decide to go back and revise.
I should trust myself more. Any time I felt like I was writing a scene into a hopeless tangent, my writing would curve back around in a full-circle moment that seemed to fit the story perfectly. As someone who plans her writing obsessively, working by instinct was a revelation: sometimes a detour is avoidance, but sometimes it’s the path you need to take to find the true scene.
Buddies are essential. When I was feeling most crazed (am I really trying to write a book while working full time through my busiest season of the year??) I corresponded with a New Hampshire Grubbie who was working at pretty much the same pace as I was. We swapped emails bolstering each other, and he was patient with the (half-crazed) hourly updates I sent him on marathon writing days (my daily word count record was 11,200 in one particularly obsessive day). Plus, he reminded me to eat.
NaNoWriMo as coliseum. For me, NaNoWriMo was a duel to the death—my creativity vs. my critic. And because I was against a clock and because I just wanted to see what would happen, my creativity won out. My critic will no doubt have the field day to end all field days when it comes time to write draft two, at which time I’ll remind her that the only reason there IS a second draft round is because my creativity wiped the floor with my critic’s ass during the first draft round.
When you’re stuck, skip ahead. I got stuck in the middle and I jumped ahead to write what turned out to be the final two chapters. This crystallized the chapters I needed between where I was and the end I was working to reach.
Come November 30, I had a 70,780-word complete first draft and a renewed appreciation for the special energy generated by the early draft, and appreciation I hope will help me as I return to the novel-in-progress I was working on before my NaNoWriMo adventure began.
At the very least, I imagine the write-first-and-edit-later skill I learned (or relearned) while writing a novel in a month will be a far more effective revision tool than flipping the bird at my draft proved to be in October.
This essay originally ran as a guest post in the Grub Street Daily blog on December 3, 2012.