What I Learned From the Binge by Writing Nine Bad Novels
This year I will be writing my tenth scary novel. I do this every November; it is part of the NaNoWriMo tradition. I have never published these novels, but I am growing as a writer and as a person every time I write one. Let me tell you why it’s worth it.
What is NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month (or NaNo for short) is a challenge to write a 50,000 word fiction during November. Anyone can write a bad novel at any time, but NaNoWriMo’s official mission is run by a non-profit organization and an army of volunteer coordinators.
The rules that no one follows are simple:
- You can only write your novel in November.
- For these purposes, a novel is defined as a work of fiction with at least 50,000 words (think of mice and humans ).
You will “win” the test if you write your novel by the end of the month. Paste its text into the “validator” on the NaNoWriMo website and you will be able to receive a printed certificate and some coupons from sponsors. It’s all.
While you are planning and writing your novel, you can spend time on the forums or join local writers. (It’s very interesting to empathize with how difficult it is to write a novel in a month.)
Lesson # 1: You don’t find time, you find it
50,000 words a month is 1,667 words a day. (For reference, this article you are reading has about 1400 words.) With an average typing speed, you can finish your daily quota in an hour. But this assumes that you already know what you are going to write.
In fact, writers (a) have to think about what they are writing and (b) have to check Twitter and clean their house for a few hours before they are ready to write. Those of us who write for life have practiced suppressing these urges, but I write non- fiction for life, and it’s still difficult to shift gears and jump into romance.
If you are motivated and diligent, then it will probably take you about two hours a day to write what you need to write. If you were good at planning ahead and typing quickly, it would be enough for one hour, but don’t expect every day to go by so well. And then the bad days? I will not name their numbers. It’s too depressing.
Here are strategies for finding the time to write:
- Find out what will crowd out your writing time . If you get up sooner or later go to bed, you need to somehow make up for the sleep. Your lunch break or evening time for watching TV may be the best candidates.
- Plan ahead . Maybe you need to get someone to look after the children, or maybe you can write something on the road if you remember to take your laptop with you. At the very least, carry a notebook with you everywhere so you can turn random downtime into a few handwritten pages or a plot outline for your next chapter.
- Get ready to write . Three 20-minute time slots are fine if you sit down already knowing what you are going to write. Every time you are busy but not writing (doing housework, exercising), think about what should happen next in your story.
To be honest, I’m not sure where the time actually comes from. For three of the nine years I’ve been writing novels, I’ve had a month-old baby in my house; for at least two I traveled and still somehow managed to do it. Sometimes the only thing that kept me going was that I had to write 333 tomorrow if I said “to hell” today.
Lesson # 2: shitty first sketches are best
In 2015, with seven bad novels under my belt, I wrote my first non-fiction book . Like my NaNo drafts, it was supposed to be 50,000 words long. Like them, I had to write very quickly (three months including research). But unlike these novels, this book had to be good .
I still wrote it the same way, counting how many words I needed to write each week and each day, and sinking my butt into a chair when my schedule said it was time to write. After agonizing over the first chapter for several days, I realized that I couldn’t make every chapter perfect the first time. I started writing chapters quickly, poorly, with notes on what to fix when I had time. Pretty soon the book went off the rails, and I even had time before the deadline to go back and edit it to perfection. If I insisted on polishing each chapter as I wrote it, I would never have finished.
I was fortunate enough to be a mentor to aspiring NaNo writers, and they each complained sometime in their first week that their story sucks and they want to start over, or they want to go back and fix the plot hole that is they wrote a few days ago.
Do not do this.
Rewriting may improve your first chapter, but it won’t get you any closer to your goal of actually completing a draft of the novel. As NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty says, going back to what you’ve already written is like turning around in the middle of a marathon to try and run the previous miles better.
You also need to stop judging your letter at this point. Make a proposal that you don’t like? Close your eyes and type the next one anyway. Some writers turn off their monitors to avoid seeing what they have written; others swear by Write or Die , a tool that plays bad music if you stop typing.
But most importantly, you must lower your expectations. It’s just impossible to write something as complex as a novel and make it perfect the first time. (Maybe some seasoned writers can do this, but neither I, nor perhaps you are seasoned writers.) I got on the right foot by reading ” No plot, no problem” before my first NaNo. So when someone asked if there could be a good novel written in a month-long haze of caffeine, I happily replied that of course my novel would be terrible!
In truth, you don’t even know what your novel is about until you write it. You might think this is a courtroom drama, but then you decided to revive the boring scene where your lawyer is kidnapped and now she’s on a spaceship, and the history of space is much more interesting. Even if you stick to your original plan, by the end you will get to know your characters and your world well enough to realize that the beginning was not quite right.
And so you write another draft. But don’t worry about it now. December revisions.
Lesson # 3: Stories Matter
For 50,000 words to pass like a novel, they must convey some kind of story. While you can do without adding lyrics in the form of lyrics and overly long descriptions of mundane things, you end up having to introduce characters and make them do something.
Learning to create stories is probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned from NaNo, let alone learning how to manage my time and write quickly. As you might have guessed, these skills pay off in my job as a journalist, but storytelling is the key to communicating in a wide variety of professions and hobbies.
I started exploring stories with a simple tip in No Plot, No Problem, to make a list of what you like about stories and a second list of what you hate. When you write, include things from the first list (magic, robots) and do not include things from the second list (action scenes, boats). It helps you spend time thinking about your favorite stories and characters, and why you like them.
In general terms, you want a beginning that sets the story, a middle where a lot of things happen, and an end that ties everything together and makes the whole story worth reading. I enjoyed putting off writing an article by reading this expansive series of blog posts [Update: Link Corrected] about 3-act structure, but you can also just steal the plot from someone dead who doesn’t mind, like Shakespeare.