The thing about NaNoWriMo is that, even though it is now late December, it only feels like last week I was pulling my hair out trying to find a way to progress my largely improvised plot before collapsing from exhaustion. But now that it is a month since, it feels like a good time to take a look back at the furious nightmare that was National Novel Writing Month 2008.
This year was my fourth time taking on NaNoWriMo. The first time, in 2005, I began a novel called Sunflower. I believe I really only wrote about 500 words and plotted out about half of the novel. Unfortunately, my demanding college schedule prevented that novel from going anywhere. The next year, 2006, I joined up with blogger Dave Carter of Yet Another Comics Blog and a few other like-minded writers to tweak the event into National Graphic Novel Writing Month, in which we would write a 250 page graphic novel script in one month. I actually did some decent work on my script but in the end I lost interest in the project.
And then there was 2007. It seems that the planets properly aligned and presented me in the optimal position to write a novel. I was incredibly receptive to inspiration, had a great support network and most importantly, I was unemployed. Without having to separate my attention with a mature person’s life, I had plenty of time each day to punch out a provocative, well-paced novel. While I was less than happy with it come November 30, in retrospect, I wrote a very good novel and it really deserves some attention and rewriting.
And for all the advantages of 2007, I found myself at a complete disadvantage in 2008. Firstly, I now had a job. Finding time to meet your daily word count isn’t very hard when you have nothing else to do, but having a job makes it next to impossible to find time for writing. Of course, the problem is not time, as it really only takes about an hour and a half of writing a day to get in the daily 1667 minimum. However, when you need time to eat, connect with your loved ones and decompress after work, frantic writing is the last thing you want to do.
To put it simply, this years NaNoWriMo was a nightmare. Even though I was writing a novel I had been kicking around for about a year, exploring subject matter that I was very well-verse in, I found myself struggling to write at all at the beginning of the month. When the 15th rolled around, I was at perhaps 7,500 words, putting me around 17,500 words behind schedule. I began to loose hope, thinking that this simply was not the year for me to win NaNoWriMo.
And then I met Write or Die!. Essentially, Write or Die! forces you to write constantly over a period of time until a word count is met. If you lull in your productivity, you are subjected to annoying sounds, red screens of shame and even worst punishment on the harsher settings. By using Write or Die!, I was able to properly force myself to write for at least two hours a day and score at least 2000 words each setting.
On the creative side of things, I found myself completely scrapping my established plot, jumping ahead in the story to where I did not have anything plotted out, choosing to improvise almost completely, raising the stakes. One page my characters are separated, plotting their next moves in shady hotel rooms, and on the next page they are all together caught in an stand off with a supernatural force of pure evil in the halls of a massive subterranean temple in Italy. I cut the crap and got to the stuff I wanted to write.
From there on the novel was written on the spot in a mad frenzy. And of course, it was a mess. A big mess. What began as a satirical thriller quickly became a surreal fantasy story, embracing the absolute strangest theories and subject matter I have ever come across. A family trip to a secluded cabin for the Thanksgiving weekend gave me time to write about 20,000 words in five days, allowing me to finish my novel with a weirdly Utopian ending and 50,088 words.
And so, while I was able to finish the book and officially add another notch to my NaNoWriMo scoreboard, I was left with a novel so unreadable it makes Kenji Siratori read like Hemingway. But I did learn some things. Namely, I realized just how good last year’s novel is and I even came across some resources and concepts that should help me polish up that novel very easily. Hopefully 2009 will see the release of this novel in some effect. I also learned a lot about discipline. All of the shamefully bad parts of this years novel are a direct result of my own lack of discipline. And lastly, I learned that I have a very difficult time not writing from the heart. While both of my novels are clearly science fiction, 2007’s novel is deeply rooted in my own struggles with faith and family. 2008’s novel on the other hand is pure gun-blazing, conspiracy nut fantasy. And the emo-novel was much more rewarding and easy to write. I felt as though I had to write it. This year’s popcorn novel came with very little emotional investment.
Learn from my mistakes (and my victory), fellow- and potential-NaNoWriMos. Keep it together, stay focused on your writing, don’t let yourself get away with not writing and write from the heart. Even if you don’t do this you can still win NaNoWriMo, but it won’t be nearly as much fun.