nanowrimo v. writing a novel
Aug. 3rd, 2009 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraSo this is my NaNoWriMo Does (Not) Teach You To Write Novels post.
I have conflicted feelings about NaNo. While I'm glad I've done it, and it definitely taught me some things that helped me to write this novel, there are some things that I needed to train my brain out of to make it work.
To tell the story properly, I think I need to
The first time I did NaNoWriMo was in 2005. I had written several "novels", none of which were nearly long enough to justify the word. My friend convinced me that it would be fun, it would be awesome, and I said yes, all right. I got super excited.
The weekend before November, she sent me an instant message. "I'm doing NaNoWriDay this weekend," she said. "You wanna do it too?"
"Okay!" typed I blithely. It would be a good warmup for NaNoWriMo, I thought, and after all, my friend was doing it--how hard could it be?
When 24 hours were over, I had 50,000 words in a Microsoft Word document, I'd slept six hours, and my characters had both sung 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and put a performance of the musical Cats. (In retrospect, the sleeping was what lost me the critical time that would have otherwise put me past 50k legitimately. Funny how that works.) As well, my parents had issued me an ultimatum: no more NaNoWriDay.
… but after that, NaNoWriMo seemed way easier. I got 30 days to write the same length of project that I'd written in 24 hours? And it didn't have to be any better? No one ever had to see it? Sweet!
Since then, I've written for NaNoWriMo four times, and won three of them. (This past year I didn't win.)
In April, I started writing this novel. I finished it in the end of July. That's four months spent writing a novel.
They took analogies off the SAT before I took it, but I could set up a pretty neat one from the story I've told so far:
NaNoWriDay : NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo : Writing a novel without NaNo
But it's never quite that simple.
In November of 2008, when I didn't complete NaNoWriMo, it was mainly because of school. I was an International Baccalaureate diploma candidate: I had midterms to take, papers to write and revise, homework to do.
I was disappointed in myself, I was sad, I didn't want to keep writing the novel I'd started that month. I was doing a lot of schoolwork, I told myself--that was all.
On the other hand, in April of 2009, when I wrote approximately 20k words, I was studying for my International Baccalaureate tests. I was stressed out, I was studying, and I got up at 5:45 almost every morning to work on writing this novel.
And I felt great about it.
So I guess that one difference between the two is expectations. If you're doing NaNoWriMo because you've done NaNoWriMo three times before and doing NaNoWriMo is just what you do--that's not going to be like writing a novel without NaNo almost at all. And if you don't reach 50,000 words, it'll feel like you failed.
On the other hand, starting a novel off your own bat can be much more satisfying, because you can go at your own pace, there aren't any expectations in terms of wordcount goals, and your only goal can be "writing to keep myself sane". I didn't even tell anyone I was writing a novel until I hit 20k.
But, to be fair, expectations can also keep you writing. I never used the NaNo forums much, but I knew that I was expected to write 50,000 words in the month, and that when I got there, I could verify and my word-counter would turn purple and everyone would know I had won.
I'm lucky: I had it both ways. For the first 20k, when the writing was fairly easy (mostly setup for what came after), I stayed quiet about it. I didn't even know if it was a novel for a while, or if I would write the novel, but after 20k, it seemed weighty enough to declare it as such. So I told everyone. I told my family, I told my friends, I told Codex, I told LJ: I'm writing a novel. I have 20k now.
The unspoken expectation was, I'm going to keep writing it.
To back that up, I found a word counter, and I started posting updates. I knew I was accountable to the people who read my LJ: if I started slipping, people would notice. They might not say anything, they might not mark it very much, they might not be surprised--one more teenager trying to write a novel and giving up. But they would notice.
If I hadn't known that people did, in fact, read my LJ, this probably wouldn't have worked nearly as well as it did. So I guess I've kind of been constructing my own community, like the one for NaNoWriMo, though I wasn't aware of it at the time.
Something that's also different was that in the NaNoWriMo community, past 50k, it doesn't really matter what your wordcount is. People who write 500k words in the month are stared at, but other than that, whether you just managed to top 50k or got to 80k and finished the novel, no one really cares. The reward is for getting to the finish line, and jogging another half a mile is your own business.
Not so in LJ-world. I predicted my novel to be 80k, based on what I knew about the story so far at 20k, and I stuck to that. When I got 50k, I didn't think, "I'm done! I'm done, I'm done, I'm done!", I thought, "Hey, I got to where I wanted to be at the end of June. Let's see if we can get a little further in the novel before July."
As well, in NaNoWriMo, it's literally all about the word count. You leave in scenes that are utterly inappropriate for the milieu, the characters, the plot. You pad your wordcount with long descriptions. I never was much of one for egregious padding, but I did, one year, re-start a novel and re-introduce all the characters while keeping the original, chronologically-accurate beginning in the file to count towards my wordcount. Like my NaNoWriDay novel, sometimes plots wandered far (far!) from where they'd begun. I turned off my 'inner editor'.
Once in my novel I wrote a scene that was completely inappropriate for the novel. It was just wrong. I wrote it because I wanted to get "wordcount" that day to hit my goal for the month. The next day, I copied the scene into my Notes file and wrote a new scene from scratch. If I'd been doing NaNo, I would've been tempted to just hare off in the new direction, because: shiny good-smelling wordcount! And I knew where the dynamics were going, and everything!
But they weren't the dynamics of the characters I'd created, or of the world I'd created. Or of the novel I'd created. So I got rid of the scene.
Part of it also is that the goals in NaNoWriMo are external, enforced onto you. You choose it, but you aren't given much choice: 50k or bust. Writing a novel on your own time demands that you figure out what sort of goals are reasonable but also will help you get up against your own limits.
Overall, it can be useful to do NaNoWriMo. It teaches you that you can in fact write something that long, with that many pages. It teaches you how to pace events in a work that long--if you crunch all the main events down into five or ten thousand words, you'll have to go on a lot of tangents to get to 50k.
But there are three things that are pretty essential to relearning to write novels after NaNoWriMo: first of all, set your own goals. Second, have or find a community that'll hold you accountable to these goals you've set for yourself. And third, follow the story, not the wordcount.
Rewriting is, again, a whole different story.
I have conflicted feelings about NaNo. While I'm glad I've done it, and it definitely taught me some things that helped me to write this novel, there are some things that I needed to train my brain out of to make it work.
To tell the story properly, I think I need to
The first time I did NaNoWriMo was in 2005. I had written several "novels", none of which were nearly long enough to justify the word. My friend convinced me that it would be fun, it would be awesome, and I said yes, all right. I got super excited.
The weekend before November, she sent me an instant message. "I'm doing NaNoWriDay this weekend," she said. "You wanna do it too?"
"Okay!" typed I blithely. It would be a good warmup for NaNoWriMo, I thought, and after all, my friend was doing it--how hard could it be?
When 24 hours were over, I had 50,000 words in a Microsoft Word document, I'd slept six hours, and my characters had both sung 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall and put a performance of the musical Cats. (In retrospect, the sleeping was what lost me the critical time that would have otherwise put me past 50k legitimately. Funny how that works.) As well, my parents had issued me an ultimatum: no more NaNoWriDay.
… but after that, NaNoWriMo seemed way easier. I got 30 days to write the same length of project that I'd written in 24 hours? And it didn't have to be any better? No one ever had to see it? Sweet!
Since then, I've written for NaNoWriMo four times, and won three of them. (This past year I didn't win.)
In April, I started writing this novel. I finished it in the end of July. That's four months spent writing a novel.
They took analogies off the SAT before I took it, but I could set up a pretty neat one from the story I've told so far:
NaNoWriDay : NaNoWriMo :: NaNoWriMo : Writing a novel without NaNo
But it's never quite that simple.
In November of 2008, when I didn't complete NaNoWriMo, it was mainly because of school. I was an International Baccalaureate diploma candidate: I had midterms to take, papers to write and revise, homework to do.
I was disappointed in myself, I was sad, I didn't want to keep writing the novel I'd started that month. I was doing a lot of schoolwork, I told myself--that was all.
On the other hand, in April of 2009, when I wrote approximately 20k words, I was studying for my International Baccalaureate tests. I was stressed out, I was studying, and I got up at 5:45 almost every morning to work on writing this novel.
And I felt great about it.
So I guess that one difference between the two is expectations. If you're doing NaNoWriMo because you've done NaNoWriMo three times before and doing NaNoWriMo is just what you do--that's not going to be like writing a novel without NaNo almost at all. And if you don't reach 50,000 words, it'll feel like you failed.
On the other hand, starting a novel off your own bat can be much more satisfying, because you can go at your own pace, there aren't any expectations in terms of wordcount goals, and your only goal can be "writing to keep myself sane". I didn't even tell anyone I was writing a novel until I hit 20k.
But, to be fair, expectations can also keep you writing. I never used the NaNo forums much, but I knew that I was expected to write 50,000 words in the month, and that when I got there, I could verify and my word-counter would turn purple and everyone would know I had won.
I'm lucky: I had it both ways. For the first 20k, when the writing was fairly easy (mostly setup for what came after), I stayed quiet about it. I didn't even know if it was a novel for a while, or if I would write the novel, but after 20k, it seemed weighty enough to declare it as such. So I told everyone. I told my family, I told my friends, I told Codex, I told LJ: I'm writing a novel. I have 20k now.
The unspoken expectation was, I'm going to keep writing it.
To back that up, I found a word counter, and I started posting updates. I knew I was accountable to the people who read my LJ: if I started slipping, people would notice. They might not say anything, they might not mark it very much, they might not be surprised--one more teenager trying to write a novel and giving up. But they would notice.
If I hadn't known that people did, in fact, read my LJ, this probably wouldn't have worked nearly as well as it did. So I guess I've kind of been constructing my own community, like the one for NaNoWriMo, though I wasn't aware of it at the time.
Something that's also different was that in the NaNoWriMo community, past 50k, it doesn't really matter what your wordcount is. People who write 500k words in the month are stared at, but other than that, whether you just managed to top 50k or got to 80k and finished the novel, no one really cares. The reward is for getting to the finish line, and jogging another half a mile is your own business.
Not so in LJ-world. I predicted my novel to be 80k, based on what I knew about the story so far at 20k, and I stuck to that. When I got 50k, I didn't think, "I'm done! I'm done, I'm done, I'm done!", I thought, "Hey, I got to where I wanted to be at the end of June. Let's see if we can get a little further in the novel before July."
As well, in NaNoWriMo, it's literally all about the word count. You leave in scenes that are utterly inappropriate for the milieu, the characters, the plot. You pad your wordcount with long descriptions. I never was much of one for egregious padding, but I did, one year, re-start a novel and re-introduce all the characters while keeping the original, chronologically-accurate beginning in the file to count towards my wordcount. Like my NaNoWriDay novel, sometimes plots wandered far (far!) from where they'd begun. I turned off my 'inner editor'.
Once in my novel I wrote a scene that was completely inappropriate for the novel. It was just wrong. I wrote it because I wanted to get "wordcount" that day to hit my goal for the month. The next day, I copied the scene into my Notes file and wrote a new scene from scratch. If I'd been doing NaNo, I would've been tempted to just hare off in the new direction, because: shiny good-smelling wordcount! And I knew where the dynamics were going, and everything!
But they weren't the dynamics of the characters I'd created, or of the world I'd created. Or of the novel I'd created. So I got rid of the scene.
Part of it also is that the goals in NaNoWriMo are external, enforced onto you. You choose it, but you aren't given much choice: 50k or bust. Writing a novel on your own time demands that you figure out what sort of goals are reasonable but also will help you get up against your own limits.
Overall, it can be useful to do NaNoWriMo. It teaches you that you can in fact write something that long, with that many pages. It teaches you how to pace events in a work that long--if you crunch all the main events down into five or ten thousand words, you'll have to go on a lot of tangents to get to 50k.
But there are three things that are pretty essential to relearning to write novels after NaNoWriMo: first of all, set your own goals. Second, have or find a community that'll hold you accountable to these goals you've set for yourself. And third, follow the story, not the wordcount.
Rewriting is, again, a whole different story.
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 03:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-08-04 01:22 pm (UTC)One of the hard things for people who don't have the luxury of writing full-time--which is most people--is balancing writing time with household chores, relationship maintenance, etc. And I've seen people for whom NaNo was good and bad that way: they could put off balancing their checkbook while they finished that one novel-length project, but they couldn't put off balancing their checkbook indefinitely. Or their housemates were willing to do extra chores for a month on the understanding that this would not be permanent.
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From:(no subject)
From: