That actually worked

50,000 words in a month. A month in which, incidentally, I blew an entire day and a half on fretting over and then celebrating the election, not to mention did my share of cleaning up an incredibly messy house and preparing Thanksgiving dinner for eight.

Six or seven weeks ago, I was having trouble writing despite my passion for my project due to a paralyzing perfectionism. I really, really, SO MUCH want to get this manuscript just right. It's a big story, with characters I could happily write about for years, maybe even a decade or two. And I've gotten such good feedback on it so far--contest success, praise from industry professionals who've seen a snippet of it--that it paradoxically made me freeze up. As in, what if I can't make the entire story live up to the strength of the premise and the opening chapters? What if I'm not good enough to do my own story and my beloved characters justice? So I was feeling my way through the manuscript at a snail's pace, maybe 500 words a day, agonizing over every sentence and sweating the structure of every scene. It had to be just right before I could go forward.

But then two things happened. The first was attending Donald Maass's master class at the Surrey Writers Conference in October. We spent most of the three-hour session taking apart a scene from our manuscripts we thought needed improvement and finding a way to strengthen it. I was amazed by how much my scene improved through the exercises Maass gave us, how much subtle changes enhanced the conflict and deepened the emotional impact and sensory vividness of the scene. It made me see that I was going about it all wrong in my effort to write a perfect draft, that there was nothing I couldn't improve AFTER I'd written it. (Yes, yes, I'm on my fourth manuscript, and you'd think I'd know that by now. But I'm still getting the hang of editing for story structure as opposed to style.)

Then I decided on a whim to try NaNoWriMo. I knew I needed something to push me out of slow motion. I didn't think I'd manage 50,000 words, but if I could just make it to 25,000, I'd be in so much better shape than I was 10/31. So I sat down with a pile of index cards, plotted out the scenes I knew I would need to get me to the end of the manuscript, and dove in. When I finished a scene, I grabbed the next card from the stack and wrote what it told me to do.

It shouldn't have worked. It's contrary to how I've always written in the past, and, really, there's no logical reason anyone who was barely managing 10,000 words/month should suddenly be able to do 50K. But I kept at it, and found myself enjoying writing more than I had in months. I was living my story again, wanting to grab everyone around me and babble about my characters and how much I loved them. (I resisted the urge. Mostly.)

I'm sure I'll have to rewrite many of those 50,000 words, but that's OK. I'm confident I've found the bones of my story now. The rest, I can fix. I'm not going to go back and look at them yet, lest I paralyze myself again with the urge to tinker. NaNo got me through Act II and into the beginning of Act III. I'm going to take a day or two to plan out Act III, make those scene index cards a little more detailed, and then I'm going to plunge back in. Not quite as fast--50,000/month IS a bit excessive. But I think I can manage 25,000 without neglecting the rest of my life, and at that rate I'll have a draft to start polishing by sometime in January.

So, all in all, NaNo worked better than I'd dreamed.

I think this is a minor corollary of Murphy's Law

Sometimes, no matter how accurate a historical novelist strives to be, she just cannot track down some detail or other. Such as, say, any kind of description of the appearance or character of a minor historical figure. Eventually, the aspiring novelist decides to make it up, or at least to extrapolate based on the thin evidence she can read between the lines when he makes an appearance in the biographies of the more prominent.

"Hm," thinks the writer. "He seems to be the one everyone else spoke to, even when they weren't speaking to each other. He had a long and apparently successful career as an ambassador, which would imply that he was, well, diplomatic. And he was the youngest of a large family. I bet he was mellow and easygoing."

Satisfied with her deduction, the writer pens two chapters wherein this mellow, unflappable man plays a large part. Throughout his scenes, our boy is calm and capable.

A few days later our writer stumbles across a line or two describing the gentleman in question in a biography of one of his more prominent relations. That calm, unflappable man? Actually, the family drama queen.

Well, I already knew I'd have some serious rewriting to do once NaNoWriMo is over...

NaNo So Far

It's going pretty well, better than I'd expected, really. I've written 3807 words in two days, which puts me a little ahead of schedule--I need about 1800 words/day if I'm to get to 50,000 by 11/30, assuming I don't write on Election Day or Thanksgiving.

What I don't know yet is whether it'll be easier or harder to churn out 1800 words or so on a weekday. On the one hand, my life is more scheduled, what with the job, writers group on Mondays, choir on Wednesdays, etc. However, if I decide to write on my lunch hour, I can shut the door, let voicemail take the phone for half an hour and enjoy blessed peace and quiet. At home, that's hard to do while my daughter is awake. I get stray bits of time here and there when she's happily by herself or playing with my husband, but I never know how long that will last, and the "happily by herself" times are rare. I'm not sure how it happened, but we two strong introverts produced an extroverted child, and she likes to have someone to play with her or at least answer her questions and listen to her stories.

The strange thing is that I don't think writing in these 15 or 20-minute snatches is hurting my work. If anything, it keeps the story toward the front of my mind as I cook, do laundry, shop for groceries, etc.

NaNoWriMo. Sorta.

The writers among this blog's readership likely already know about NaNoWriMo. For the rest of you, that's National Novel Writing Month--a group exercise in madness, now in its tenth year, wherein people around the world try to draft novels of at least 50,000 words during the month of November.

I've been aware of NaNo for at least five years, but I haven't signed up for it before because technically you're supposed to start a new novel from scratch on November 1. I've never happened to finish a manuscript in September or October, hence no NaNo. I'm not the type to stop mid-draft on one book to work on another.

And I'm in mid-manuscript now--17,000 words into my rewrite of Invasion, a rewrite so radical I'm using maybe 10% of the scenes from the first draft, tops. So instead of using NaNo to write 50K words on a new story, I'm going to try to add that much to the WIP.

It's ambitious, and I may not get there. It also seems counterintuitive to everything I've learned of late about not pushing myself too hard or killing myself over artificial deadlines. And if I'm stressed beyond belief a week in, I can and will quit. I already know I can finish a manuscript; that won't change if NaNo turns out to be wrong for me.

But I want to try. I think I need to test myself a bit, get my competitive juices flowing. I want to see if I can find ways to write faster. Maybe close my browser window when I open Word, for starters. I can always make a note to go back later to check the OED to see if some word is an anachronism, or to look up the exact date of some event in my protagonist's backstory. Because, let's face it, I spend less time in the OED or on wikipedia than I do obsessively checking Gmail every time the new message indicator appears. And maybe I don't always have to wait till my daughter is asleep to write. Not that I want to give her less attention, but when she's playing happily and quietly or watching TV, why not write a few paragraphs? And why not use my lunch hour at work for something other than obsessively checking political blogs? (At least after Nov. 4!)

Above all, I want to plunge into the story and out of my own head games--the usual doubt demons I think most writers have to some degree or other. I want to write with passion. So on the stroke of midnight, I'm going to write a couple of pages before I go to bed. When I wake up, instead of spending an hour cycling through political blogs, I'll write some more. And we'll see how it goes from there...