December 2, 2012 by Dan Radmacher
Around mid-October, I decided to partake in NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — in November. The challenge: Write a novel (or 50,000 words of a novel, anyway) in 30 days.
Literally since I learned how to print, I’ve wanted to be a novelist. My grand plan in college was to get my bachelor’s degree in psychology so I could learn what makes people tick, then a graduate degree in journalism so I could get a job where I meet a lot of people and come across many interesting situations. I thought that would be tremendous preparation for the life of a novelist. As a teen, I wrote several short stories and started a couple of novels — sci fi and fantasy stuff, mostly. I never finished a novel, but I submitted several of the stories. I never got any fiction published, though, and the last time I looked back at what I wrote, it wasn’t hard to see why.
I did follow through on my grand plan. I got the degrees I planned and a job as a journalist. Twenty years later, though, still no novel. I worked on a detective novel that a friend and I were going to co-write. We made quite a bit of progress, but the novel finally collapsed under the weight of plot changes we decided to make in late-night phone calls but never got around to writing into the manuscript. I continued dabbling in fiction off and on for years, but never had the discipline to sit down and see a novel all the way through.
This seemed like a great way to force the discipline. The NaNoWriMo approach involves telling everyone you know what you’re doing, and keeping them up on your progress. Facebook served that purpose well.
I had an idea that I’d been kicking around since college, but had never written more than a couple of pages about, and only had really the vaguest idea beyond the concept. But it was one of those things I’d think about when I was driving or out on a solo hike. And one day I had a brainstorm about how to make the ending I had visualized clear to the reader. Something was missing, though. I needed a clearer motivation and a little more emotional oomph. Then I read the biography of Steve Jobs
that came out a few months after his death. I had been thinking all along that my character would be someone like Jobs, a driven perfectionist with vast personal wealth to pursue the project I had in mind. But reading that book, it struck me that my protagonist should be the son of such a man, and that his father should die young, like Jobs, to give him the motivation to pursue the project. It started to really gel in my mind, but I still couldn’t get any words out.
Which brings us back to NaNoWriMo. When I made that commitment, the thinking about the novel clicked into overdrive. I thought up plot points and scenes. It was still a very vague framework, but by Nov. 1, I had a pretty clear idea of how the novel would start, the general arc of the plot, and the ending.
I easily met my goal the first day. Fell behind the second. Caught up the third. Then it was the week of the election. I’m a political junky. My focus for much of the week preceding the election was the campaign. On election night, I was up until 3 am, watching the returns, waiting for the concession, watching the victory speech. I was wiped out for several days after, and went nearly a week without writing a word. But I picked it up that weekend and made some progress. Then other things got in the way that slowed me down. A weekend work event that kept me from writing for three days, for instance. It was fits and starts, and, I really didn’t think I would hit 50,000. I told myself that didn’t matter. What mattered was to keep the words coming. If I didn’t hit 50k, it wouldn’t matter, as long as I had made significant progress in the month.
At some point, I discovered the NaNoWriMo Facebook group for the Shenandoah Valley and Winchester regions. That turned out to be my savior. I found out, much to my surprise, that writing doesn’t have to be solitary activity. The group had Facebook events they called write-ins. People would meet at designated times, and write together. With NaNoWriMo, the emphasis is all on word count. The mandate is to lock your inner editor in the closet for the month, and just worry about getting the rough draft written. To facilitate that, the write-ins featured word sprints and word wars. With word sprints, the first person to reach a certain word count — 150 or 200 words, usually — “won.” Word wars involve a set amount of time — 20 minutes was my favorite, especially toward the end, but they tended to be shorter. When the time was out, people would post their word counts and whoever had the highest “won.” Prizes were usually photos handed out by one of the team leaders, usually centering on some sort of theme. The world’s highest peaks, for instance, or cuddly pets.
I found the sprints and the wars to be incredibly focusing. When those were going on, I was writing. I wasn’t tempted to switch over to my Facebook news feed, or call up a favorite blog or go get another beer. I just wrote. It wasn’t about the winning, but if I didn’t have a good count, I wanted to be able to explain it. In between the sprints and the wars, participants chatted, or kept writing, or both. The nights I got in 3,000, 4,000 or — once — 5,000 words were all nights I was taking part in one of these events.
I would not have made it to 50,000 if not for them, and the other people who took part.
But I did, and it felt good. The novel’s not done. I’ve probably got about a third of the story to get through, and there’s a lot of meat I want to flesh out when I go back through what I wrote in such a rush. I figure I have maybe a month or two of non-driven writing to finish it and then another couple months of editing before I’ll have it ready to start shopping around to agents.
In the meantime, I’m hoping the Facebook group keeps getting together (perhaps a bit less often) for write-ins and encouragement.
For anyone who’s interested, here’s a preview of the first chapter — which I called the Prologue, but that isn’t quite right since the event it describes takes place about midway through the novel:
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