Yesterday was a serious-thinking day on my novel, rather than fingers-on-keyboard day. I got zero words, but I figured out who the antagonist is. (I’d thought I had one already, but I’d realized he wasn’t going to work. I needed someone further away, and someone more. . . not more formidable, because the guy I’d been thinking of is plenty formidable, but more. . . Dangerous.
Anyway, after yesterday’s thinking, I got a good bit of writing done today.
It’s nice to be here, because I think I can see several more days of cranking out prose based on what I’ve just figured out, whereas for a couple of days there I was just creeping along, making little tweaks around the edges, because I didn’t know where it was going to go next. Now I do.
One of the flaws of my fiction writing is that my heroes tend to be quiet people, eking out a meager existence during hard times. This is largely due to my perspective on the future, which is that hard times are very likely coming, combined with my own cautious nature, projected onto my heroes.
The problem is that quietly eking out a meager existence in the face of hard times doesn’t really make for an exciting story.
What tends to make for an exciting story is a hero trying to achieve great things.
So, for my novel, I’m trying to lean into this idea. As this is not my natural inclination, I hadn’t really laid the groundwork for this in my first few thousand words, but I have now gone back and layered in a tiny bit of backstory that shows the hero as someone who has tried to achieve great things in the past, and as the sort of person who might do so again in the future.
And I think I did it without violating the rule about minimizing rewriting. During a November novel-writing month you want to move forward as fast as possible, leaving any rewriting for after there’s a first draft. Essentially everything I did was adding new scenes between existing scenes that advanced the action while providing a bit of backstory.
The writing isn’t going very fast. I’ve been averaging a bit under 700 words a day, which is a bit less than half of what I’d need to hit 50,000 by the end of the month. Which is okay, because hitting 50,000 words is a goal, not a moral committment. And I’m thinking things will pick up, once the “striving to achieve great things” mojo starts working.
Today’s supermoon rising above the detention pond I often walk Ashley around. Just right of center in the water you can see a V-shaped ripple that is the wake of a muskrat swimming along.
I got in a very good morning writing session today, starting pretty much right after second dog walk. By late morning I’d topped 1200 words. I took a break then and paused to do some on-line chatting with my brother, some morning exercises, and take the dog out for third walk just before lunch.
I stopped at a point where I’m not quite sure what comes next. This is widely considered a bad move, because it makes it harder to get back to writing. Still, sometimes it happens, and it’s worth having a couple of tricks for getting going again.
Here’s one: skip ahead and write a “candy-bar scene.”
A candy-bar scene, if you don’t know, is a scene that you already know is going to be fun to write. A scene where a character does something wonderful, or something wonderful (or wonderfully awful) happens. A scene where a reversal happens that’s both completely unexpected and inevitable. A scene that makes you reinterpret the whole story up to that point.
Besides being fun to write, hopefully a candy-bar scene is also fun to read.
Arguably, your whole book should be nothing but candy bar scenes. In practice that’s hard to do, but it’s certainly something to keep in mind.
Anyway, I had a candy-bar scene in mind as something I could write when I got back to writing this evening. In fact though, I picked up exactly where I left off, adding a good bit to the scene that had petered out on me in the morning session. (I can probably credit thinking during a dog walk for this.) Then I did go on to write the first bit of the candy-bar scene I’d had in mind. But only little bit of it, leaving a nice ragged edge where I know what happens next, all ready to pick up tomorrow.
It’s a nice feeling.
Another nice feeling is that I hit the target word count. (That is, the 1667 words per day I need to average, if I’m going to hit 50,000 words by the end of November.) I’m not actually very fixed on hitting the word count, but I figured I give it a try, at least for a little while.
For the morning writing session I wore my writing vest—the moleskin vest Jackie made me years and years ago, that I took to Clarion with me, and have made a point of wearing when I wanted to crank out some serious words. It worked great.
I didn’t get a photo, but I’ll try to get one later.
This evening I switched to my wool Filson vest, which I’d worn for warmth when I took the dog out for fourth walk, and I got a sort-of picture of me wearing it, sitting with my dog.
It’s a little hard to see in the photo—the green vest looks almost the same color as my grey mock-T—but this is the same vest that Joe Pickett wears in the C.J. Box stories. It is cozy and durable.
I was busy most of the day. In the morning I took Jackie to her (last!) physical therapy appointment, and in the afternoon I had my usual Thursday visit with some former co-workers. But in the early evening (after fourth dog walk) I sat down and wrote a few hundred words. I’ve also updated the progress tracker in the sidebar. (And, if you’re reading it, wrote this brief post on my day’s progress.)
Three things I should do soon (they’re on my schedule for “before November 1st”): Write a logline, short synopsis, and long synopsis for the story. I don’t know that I need to do all three, but I should definitely do some thinking about what the story is about before I spend much more time writing.
Probably just the sort of thinking to do tomorrow while walking the dog.
Today was something of a trial run at what I’m hoping to do during NaNo 2.0. I did first dog walk, ate breakfast, and did second dog walk. Then I sat down and banged out a few hundred words on my new novel. Then I did my morning exercises, followed by a workout.
Going forward, I’m hoping to be able to spend some of the afternoon and evening writing as well. At least, that’s the plan I’m hoping to follow all November.
Today we spent a big chunk of the afternoon enrolling in new Medicare Advantage plans, because the insurance company that we’ve been using for nearly 20 years is closing up shop. We had been very happy with our old health insurance. We’re approaching this new plan with a degree of trepidation. The signup was a one-time thing, and the fact that I had to spend my afternoon that way doesn’t mean that I’ll be unable to write future afternoons. I hope.
Now it’s evening, and I got a tiny bit more writing done.
All told my day’s writing came to 879 words. That comes to only about half of the 1667 I’ll have to average to get 50,000 words by the end of November. But that’s okay. I’m just getting started.
The workout was my first workout in more than a month—since Jackie had her surgery, and I got very busy. (There were only a couple of weeks when I was nearly a full-time caregiver, but even after that period was over, it turned out that just the odd hour here and there taking Jackie to physical therapy and such put a hole in the day that was hard to work around.)
I’ve started generating prose for my NaNo 2.0 story, despite the fact that starting early is supposed to be against the rules.
I figure it’s okay because I’m not really trying to write the story yet. I’m just capturing some text to use to validate things like the NaNo 2.0 progress bar, which should now be visible in my sidebar, below my short profile, and above the form for subscribing to my newsletter.
I’m not sure the progress bar is working yet. It looks kind of minimal, but maybe that’s just because I haven’t written much yet. By the time NaNo 2.0 goes live on November 1st, it should be clear that it’s working.
Besides writing, I’m making notes about how the story is supposed to go. I don’t really have an outline yet, but I’m capturing internal details about the story world as I figure them out.
And I’m figuring it out while I’m walking. Mostly while I’m walking the dog.
I’ve always done some of my best thinking about stories while walking. The past three years or so, I’ve done less such thinking, for two reasons: The dog, and podcasts.
Ashley, especially as a younger dog, was kind of hard to walk. She was a little too likely to lunge growling and snarling at people. (Too often she acts like she’s a very good dog until she jumps on someone, so people want to meet her, and then get booped in the nose with Ashley’s snout.) So I’ve really had to be very alert to people coming within reach, to make sure nothing bad happened.
That made it harder to think about other stuff while I was walking Ashley.
I’ve also been listening to podcasts, which I rather enjoy, but which also lead to less thinking about stories while I’m walking.
So, between Ashley behaving much better these days, and cutting back on podcast listening, my walks are turning back into an excellent opportunity for plotting.
I did NaNoWriMo back in 2010. (There’s a NaNoWriMo tag, if you want to read the related posts.) I wasn’t successful. Worse, I found it didn’t help me write more or better. So after that one year, I pretty much gave up on the idea of writing-sprint-type things. This year though, I’ve decided to give it another try. Specifically, I’m thinking of doing NaNo 2.0.
Why
The reason is simply that I’ve scarcely been writing at all for years now, and something like this seems like a way to get myself back to it.
I know how to get writing done, which is to write every day. I also know that (for me) it’s important to start writing early in the day. As I say in that post:
“Even just 20 or 40 minutes of early morning writing gets my head into the story space, and once it’s there I’ll continue to have story ideas through the day.”
It’s possible to get lots of writing done late in the day, but I know from experience that that my writing time is much more productive if I’ve gotten at least a little bit done early.
What
So, what am I going to do? Mainly, I’m going to write every day. That’s how I get writing done.
Less important, but not nothing: I’m going to set an ambitious word-count goal (1667 words per day). I won’t beat myself up if I don’t hit it, but I will take it seriously.
Also less important, but a trap I’ve been known to fall into: I’m going to make a point of refraining from going back and dicking around with the beginning until I have a complete draft. A complete draft is something I can fix. One-third of a draft isn’t.
The rules
Even the original NaNoWriMo rules made it clear that you didn’t need to write a novel specifically The point was simply to pick a large project and try to make progress on it each day for a month. But writing a novel would be cool, and given my experience of both my previous NaNoWriMo project, and of writing things since then, I’ve come around to thinking that a rather classic version of NaNoWriMo might work well for me.
So, my plan is very nearly straight NaNoWriMo. I’ll write daily from November 1st to November 30th. The 1667 word-count goal is simply a 50,000 words divided by 30 days. I’ll refrain from going back and editing my previous days’ work (except that minimal line-edits will be okay, as will making notes if I see things that I’ll want to change later).
You’re not supposed to start writing early. (It’s fine to start plotting early, doing research, making notes, etc.) Still, I’m not hesitating to capture some fragments of prose when something pops into my head. For one thing, that gives me some material for making sure that my backup mechanisms and file syncing mechanisms are working, so those are things I don’t need to worry about in November when I’m ready to start cranking.
I’ll try to post frequent updates here (although I won’t let such updates interfere with getting my writing done).
One of my most productive days ever was on board an Amtrak train from Chicago to Champaign. I think I wrote four Wise Bread posts (including this one in praise of Amtrak), as well as getting some fiction writing done.
Related to that, I have been meaning for a while to link to this post about using cruise ships as workspaces. The cruise ships don’t offer free travel for writers, but the repositioning cruises are relatively cheap (because they tend to be dull—long days of crossing the open ocean–and because you end up on the other side of the world and end up having to fly back home), so you can do it yourself.
I’m always intrigued by ideas like this (such as rolling my own coworking spaces locally) because writing can so easily turn into day after day of solitary sameness. In fact, though, my desk in my study is a great place to get work done.
Speaking of which: progress on the novel continues apace. I’m averaging 1000 words a day, and it does not seem like a strain to do so. (Whereas trying to average 1667 words a day for NaNoWriMo did feel like a strain. Maybe I’ve found my sweet spot.)
As NaNoWriMo ends, I’ve taken down my progress bar. It topped 15,000 around mid-month, but hasn’t moved much since then. I’ve re-learned a lesson I’ve learned before—I can only produce around 1000 words of fiction per day on a sustained basis.
At the end of the first week I managed a 2300-word day to get back on track, but then only hit 300 words each of the next two days. That pretty much put paid to the notion of hitting 50,000 by the end of the month—and the related discouragement made it all the harder to be productive over the second half of the month.
However, I’m by no means giving up. At 1000 words per day, I should be able to finish this novel in just another couple of months.
That’s my plan. I may even put up a non-NaNaWriMo progress bar.
Even with the failure to produce a novel in a month, I’ve found the process to be useful. Two things in particular stand out:
I had a boatload of new novel ideas that I’ve had to push aside to keep working on this one. They all seem particularly shiny. I’m looking forward to picking one of them to work on next.
I’ve learned a lot about structuring a novel, which is very different from structuring a short story. I’ll have more to say about that in the future.
I spent most of the morning making minor revisions to my outline, based on insights into how the novel should be structured. There’ll be some more of that this afternoon—but also, hopefully, some new text generation as well.
Thursday is my busy day—lifting weights and Taiji in the morning, lunch with friends, and then the weekly Esperanto Club meeting in the evening—so I hadn’t hit my word count that day. On top of that, I’d fallen slightly short on Friday as well, so I got up this morning some 500 words off the pace.
One long day of writing today, though, and I’m back on track with just over 10,000 words. And that progress was despite some minor restructuring of the stuff I’ve already written.
I often find it hard to go on when I’m writing stuff that won’t mesh with what I’ve already written. It helps a lot to take an hour or two and get the earlier stuff to match my current conception of the story. Of course it’s better when I don’t spend my time that way, but sometimes it’s just faster to go ahead and do it than to try and keep track of what I need to fix.
Not only that, but I also finished up a Wise Bread post which will probably go up tomorrow or the next day.
