Yesterday I did something I would have done during National Novel Writing Month if my novel hadn’t stalled out after 10,000 words. I took part in a write-in, specifically one set up as an offshoot of the local NaNoWriMo group where people are invited during the NaNo off-months to write at Waves Coffee in New Westminster every Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
There’s a reserved from at the back that conveniently has a door that can be closed, allowing writerly types to scribe with little interference from outside. Eight had officially signed up on the Facebook page but a total of 11 made it, which resulted in a rather crowded table. I almost felt like I was co-authoring the projects of those to my left and right through osmosis.
Still, it was useful to have that three-hour block of (mostly) quiet concentration and focus. While I didn’t work on a single project, I successfully bounced around several, including:
new material on my 2014 NaNo novel, Road Closed
going over 2016’s stalled project and fixing most of the tense problems (specifically I started writing in the present tense then switched to the past tense without consciously meaning to. I have managed to fix all but the final section of writing to align everything to the present tense).
I was hoping to do some work on the short story “The Box on the Bench” but am still mulling over how best to approach it. I’ll write more on the revival of this ten-year-old (!) project soon.
Apart from a slight crick in my neck, I found the experience useful and refreshing. I’ll definitely be returning. If I actually write straight through next time I should be able to get quite a bit done, a novel (ho ho) change from my progress of late.
Now that my NaNoWriMo 2016 project has officially fizzled out, here’s my plan for 2017 if I choose to participate again (and I am at this very early stage leaning toward not doing so):
Come up with an idea at least a full month ahead of time
Plan out the tools to be used for the writing at least two weeks in advance
Outline the novel (new!)
Spend at least the first weekend building up as large a buffer as possible (the first weekend starts on Saturday, November 4th)
Talk talk talk about my novel–share all kinds of stuff, go totally bananas on it (new!)
Attend more local NaNoWriMo events
And that’s about it. I actually did the first two this year and still flopped. Maybe adding in the other four will result in dazzling success.
Technically I could still complete National Novel Writing Month 2016 successfully by writing just under 40,000 words between now and midnight tomorrow.
If you are a gambling type I recommend against betting on this happening.
Then again, Donald Trump is President-Elect. Right is wrong, the impossible is possible and all that.
Speaking of which, it’s time to dissect how this year’s failure came to be.
First, what I did right:
I settled on a story (of sorts) well before November 1st, giving me plenty of time to mull it over and have some ideas ready so I could hit the proverbial ground running
I had an established, successful plan from years past, using WriteMonkey, saving to OneDrive and writing during my lunch at work, something that can spot me as many as 1,000 words before I even get home, a big psychological boost
Day 1 started strong, well above the minimum word threshold
Despite uncertainties with the story, I continued to stay above the minimum word count for five of the first six days–a good start!
At the end of day six I was at 10,002 words, on track to finish November 29th (today). Cutting it a bit close but still, victory was entirely possible. What went wrong, then?
I took Day 7 off. I planned to spend time thinking about how to best tackle the rest of the story, which was still a bit too vague and shapeless for my liking. This is not in and of itself a bad idea but in the context of NaNoWriMo it is a great way to kill momentum. By skipping a day and by not having a big cushion of words to fall back on (let’s call it The Stephen King Zone) I had to double my input the next day to stay on track (writing 3,334 words instead of 1,667). This would also mean finding twice the time to accomplish the task. With doubts about the story lingering, taking a day off was a tactical blunder.
The day after I took the ill-advised day off was Election Day in the U.S. Throughout the day I experienced a level of anxiety that by evening transformed into a kind of existential despair, sapping me of the will to write anything except perhaps a brief essay on what it feels like to curl up in a ball on the floor.
The following day I re-read the 5,000 or so words I’d written for last year’s NaNoWriMo and found what I’d written to be more engaging than expected. I decided to switch back to this story. I had ideas. Changing gears could work! (Hint: wrong.)
I hit a dead end on the old story almost immediately. Looking back I was still not in a good frame of mind to write. My brain was buzzing, but with maddening, distracting and negative thoughts. I settled for writing anything as long as I was writing but was utterly incapable of putting down anything coherent. The experience was subtly surreal, so much so it would probably make for an interesting character moment in a story. Irony.
After my briefly-revived alternate project stalled out, I returned to my original story but could never summon more than a few sentences each day, usually totaling a hundred words or so. I fell even further behind. Eventually it became obvious that I was not going to complete NaNoWriMo this year and I quietly accepted this. I moved onto other projects and am just now starting to really write again.
Without getting overly political, the election of Trump had a fairly profound effect on me. Friends joked about how I’d want to suddenly switch to writing about some near-future dystopia but both of my stories were nominally hopeful and over the course of a day they came to feel false, even pointless. I’ve come out of the funk since then and have some thoughts on how I’d approach NaNoWriMo if I participated again–and I am leaning toward not doing so–but for now I am just happy to be writing anything again.
What a weird turn of events this month has been, writing-wise.
I was not excited about my story idea for National Novel Writing Month but I at least had an idea and was able to start on Day 1 with words a-plenty. Even as I hit roadblocks in the first few days I always found a way to push through.
Then doom came to NaNoWriMo.
On November 7th I decided to take a day off and plan/plot/mull/whatever. This was a mistake. By design taking a day off slows momentum. You skip 24 hours and the next day you need to write 3334 words instead of 1667. The latter is not even intimidating to me but the former is. And if you don’t write those 3334 words on the following day you begin to slip further behind and risk not just killing the momentum, but salting the earth it’s buried under. Or something like that.
November 8th was the U.S. election that saw Trump elected. This was, in psychological terms, the equivalent of hearing, “The world has gone mad, nothing matters anymore. Give up. Stop.” And I did not write that day.
The next day felt like a bad hangover. I made another decision that was not necessarily unwise but also didn’t help. I switched back to another project, Weirdsmith. I’d re-read what I’d done during last year’s NaNoWriMo, liked it more than I’d remembered, and committed to picking it up. But I only wrote handfuls of words. I wasn’t able to get into the story’s zone so the next few days I stumbled about and fell even further behind.
Then I thought of revisiting Road Closed, my still-unfinished 2014 effort (I did hit 50,000 words with it, though). This is something I’d been wanting to do for awhile. I started tidying up the story into a workable format again and this is where I sit, with two weeks remaining.
I am not feeling overly confident. Or confident.
Tomorrow is November 17th. I feel like it will be a turning point or maybe I just want it to be one.
The other odd thing is that while my NaNo effort has sputtered, even my regular blogging has fizzled. It’s like all the energy I had pent up got sucked out by a few sour events and I’ve been unable to get past them. Or I like making excuses.
Which is why I’m making this blog entry tonight. Excuse-making time is over! Over-ish.
On Day 7 of NaNoWriMo 2016 I found myself feeling particularly unmotivated but I dutifully sat down at lunch hour and typed out 100 words. I tried continuing but could come up with nothing. Rather than force it I decided I had earned a rest day and would devote myself to thinking about where the story would go next. I had written a little and would still work on the novel, if not directly.
Day 8 coincided with the election south of the border and my lunch was cut short because I needed to be somewhere immediately after. As such I only managed a paltry 124 words at lunch (it sounds more impressive when I frame it as a 24% improvement on Day 7) and when I got home in the evening to find Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the United States (I cannot adequately summarize my feelings about this in a few words but imagine my head tilted to the side and strange, incoherent babble issuing from my mouth and you’re close enough) I found I could not write at all, feeling a near-existential level of anxiety and an inability to focus.
I avoided social media, I avoided the news, I holed up and mentally hid away.
Today I am uncertain of how to proceed. There are a few concrete facts. My total word count as of yesterday is 10,536. To be on par after eight days would require 13,336 words, meaning I have a deficit of 2,800 words. With a strong effort that could be condensed into one extra day’s worth of writing, something that could be knocked out on a weekend, for example. This also assumes that I stay on track today and all other remaining days by continuing a pace of at least 1,667 words per day.
While I surprised myself by getting past an early hurdle with the story–a story I’ve never been enthused about–I am less certain I can do so now after a couple of down days. I debate over whether to plod on (“all writing is good!”) vs. admitting defeat and stopping (“now I can devote my time to something more constructive and/or enjoyable”).
The benefit of continuing is it helps reinforce the habit of writing and that is by far the most challenging aspect of writing for me, more than my annoying habit of switching between present and past tense, more than my tendency to lapse into passive voice, more than my stellar ability to start a story but never finish it. Sitting down and writing every day is essential to instilling the discipline needed to write and it is that discipline that strengthens the writing, that lets me find my voice as an author. It’s why I vowed to post every day on this blog last year (I’ve kept up fairly well on that, though I’ve lapsed, ironically enough, this very month).
If I do stop this story my backup plan is to start work on another but keep the existing word count toward my official NaNo total. I’ve written the words, after all, so they should still count. Technically it’s cheating but in the spirt of writing vs. not writing, I think it’s okay.
The next challenge would be what to write. My choices, as I see them:
start writing a new story
continue work on a previous NaNo effort. Even the ones that are technically done still need work or revision and several are still in a DNF state. The choices here are:
Road Closed (needs revision and an ending)
The Ferry (needs revision)
The Mean Mind (revision/ending)
Weirdsmith (barely started)
Start of the World (a little further along than Weirdsmith, but not by much)
continue working on my short story collection, 10 Pairs of Shorts.
free write 39,464 words of prose
A lot of options, some more enticing than others. I am not going to free write 39,464 words over the next 21 days (though I’d love to see what the last few thousand looked like).
I’m going to mull and commit to something this evening and get back to writing, blotting out (or perhaps infusing my writing with) the completely bonkers results of the US election.
The total after six days: 10,312
Minimum needed to stay on target: 10,002
I have a 310 word buffer–not exactly a huge buffer, but the important thing is I’m now over 20% of the way to my target, the novel is starting to take some kind of shape (though I still don’t think it’s very good) and I’m content to keep plowing along.
I feel I am past the point where I could switch to another story and still meet the 50,000 word target by month’s end, so I’m committed to this story, for better or for worse (right now it’s more for mediocrity).
Here are the stats for Days 2-4 of NaNoWriMo 2016:
Day 2: 1867
Day 3: 1112
Day 4: 1722
As you can see I slacked a bit on Day 3 but the buffers of the other days have kept me slightly ahead of pace. Four days in requires you to be at 6667 words and I’m sitting at 6839. Way to be a tiny bit above average!
I am not very excited by my story so far and in a way I am surprised that I have been able to keep on track and keep writing. I think the difference is this year I am taking a wider view of the effort, seeing beyond the effort of specifically writing a novel in 30 days and instead seeing the restoration of the daily (fiction) writing habit as a worthy goal unto itself, even if the novel ends up being poop.
I’m also now ahead of last year’s effort, so I’ve already achieved a victory of sorts. Hooray for me!
Although I wasn’t entirely sure what I would write–as in, which story idea I would go with–I ended Day 1 of National Novel Writing Month on a successful note, exceeding the minimum of 1667 words by topping out at 2138. This is already close to half the word total of last year’s failed attempt.
The second day is one of the toughest in my experience. It’s fairly easy to blurf out almost anything to get started, but the second day is where you need to start finding a direction for the story if you haven’t already. It was at this point last year that I stalled out and never recovered.
But I am cautiously optimistic this time. Sort of.
It is the eve of National Novel Writing Month and I technically have a story ready to go, though I’m actually not really sure what I’ll be writing tomorrow. I’ll be writing something, though. A story of some sort, all fictional-like.
What I do know is I won’t be writing on a shiny new MacBook because Apple has decided to make all of their laptops insanely great expensive. I’m still a little tempted by the “low end” MacBook Pro or even the old model that they’re still selling for $1549. Sure it’s a little slower and a little heavier but for $350 less I might be able to live with that. We’ll see.
In the meantime, tomorrow begins the great writing adventure once again. I can’t say I have a good feeling about it this year but I may surprise myself. I have made a promise to keep writing even if my NaNoWriMo project fizzles and if I break that promise I will make myself feel bad. That’ll show me.
Potential ideas: 2. This doesn’t sound like much, but with nine days before National Novel Writing Month is underway, having two ideas ready to go puts me way ahead of where I usually am, which is zero ideas the day before. Still, the ideas aren’t making my socks roll up and down yet so I am still hunting around for more. At least I’m not trying to recycle an existing story again, something that has failed more often than it’s worked. “No, I’m sure we’ll miss the iceberg this time!”
Writing tools: I’d previously decided to write in text/markdown format, which broadens my choices of writing software quite a bit since the file(s) will easily move between programs without any formatting weirdness happening, since there will essentially be no formatting.
However, I would still prefer to use a program that works on all three platforms I’m likely to use:
Windows
Mac
iOS
Right now the only option that covers all three is Word and Word is the super-colossal opposite of a plain text writing program. Most of my other choices are available on two of the three platforms. My original idea was to use FocusWriter because it works on PC and Mac, and then to use one of the many plain text programs available on iOS, like iA Writer. I’d wanted to use WriteMonkey again but it looks like it won’t be out of beta before NaNo starts. Boo. But I’ve never really used FocusWriter and now I’m trying the Mac and iOS-only demo version of Ulysses, which is kind of like Scrivener but with the billion features I never use removed. And it saves seamlessly, unlike Scrivener, which always feels like it’s on the verge of destroying everything you’ve written because of its insane save-every-two-seconds coupled with millions of disparate files and not forgetting you better not have your project open on another device. I mean, it’s fine, but it scares me.
So I am in the odd position of having a story idea (or two) ready to go but still haven’t figured out how I’m going to actually write the thing yet.
Maybe I will write longhand, in loving tribute to Harlan Ellison.
Haha, no.
He would think this entire post is completely stupid, though. Did Ben Franklin fret about which feather quill to write with? No, he just killed a turkey, plucked a feather and started writing. On paper, I mean, not the turkey. Or maybe on the turkey. I don’t know, maybe that was a thing back then.
With two weeks before the writingpalooza of National Novel Writing Month begins, I came up with another idea, this one while laying in bed waiting to fall asleep. Weirdly, I managed to remember the idea and recorded it the next day.
I’ve been itching to do some kind of alternate dimension/parallel universe story but the ones I’ve mulled (or actually tried) have proven too ambitious for the fevered writing that NaNoWriMo demands. This new idea pares everything down considerably and in the end is basically a simple love story.
I’ve tentatively titled it One Slip and the story goes something like this:
A couple meet in their early 20s and spend the next 20+ years together, experiencing the usual ups and downs of any relationship, against the backdrop of the Vancouver gay community and the specter of AIDs.
One day as they stroll around the rugged terrain of a national park, one of the partners slips at the edge of a lookout over a spectacular waterfall. There is a safety barrier but it’s too low and he goes over, as his partner watches in horror. The body is never found.
As the surviving partner grapples with the loss of his spouse, he begins to experience odd phenomenon that seems related to his departed lover. Gradually he begins to wonder if they are messages “from beyond the grave.” Eventually he realizes that his partner is still alive and somehow trapped in another dimension, one that has a portal just below the falls. The other dimension is unstable and unfriendly and time is running out.
The story concludes with a return to the waterfall and a last ditch effort to pull the missing partner back into the world where he belongs–or risk having both end up in the other world where neither should be.
The ending could be radically different, as this is just idle thinking right now, and the details of the alternate dimension, sketchy as they are, may also change. But it’s still meatier than the subway story so it might gain some traction.
And I still have two weeks to think of a third and even more undoubtedly spectacular idea. Go, creativity! (please)
With three days left before my self-imposed deadline to come up with a spiffy idea for NaNoWriMo (and six days before the official forum gets reset and would-be authors are permitted to post details of their 2016 novels), I have…one fragment of an idea.
It goes like this: The protagonist gets on a commuter train and instead of taking him to work as it always has, it takes him somewhere else, somewhere weird, wrong or possibly horrible. From there, the rest of the story chronicles how he and his fellow commuters puzzle out how and if they can get back to their comfortably mundane world.
It’s not much but the fact that I have a smidgen of something gives me some hope I may be able to meet at least the technical requirement of having an idea in place by October 1st.
