Today, my characters went on a journey by train, so I spent some time thinking about trains and their amenities. Is it reasonable to have semi-fancy sleeper cars with private bathrooms on a steampunk steam engine? I guess so. It’s somewhere between the old west and Amtrak, which is quite a bit of space to work in.
Moving the story to a new location without a detailed outline comes with the awkwardness of logistics, getting characters to the places they need to be for the story to continue, while making it all flow nicely. Since I didn’t do much prep, I needed to spend some time expanding the world—not just in landscape, but in history and culture.
So far, they’ve been in a city loosely based on London. Now they’re heading north, with the eventual goal of traveling to some islands off the coast. This new area is loosely based on Northern Ireland, with a few hints at some civil strife that mirrors the history of that area. It’s also a place with a distinctive look that I can use to easily come up with setting descriptions.
The nice thing about this kind of setting shorthand is that it lets me continue writing quickly. I’ve already got a lot of built-in connections and images in my head. The downside is that those connections and images are mostly real world or overused tropes, so I’ll want to go back in revisions and decide how to change the settings and make them more interesting and unique.
NaNoWriMo is a great reminder that you don’t have to be inspired to write. A lot of writing is just putting words on the page, regardless of how you feel. Often, if you come back later, it’s hard to tell what writing came from the “inspired” sessions and which ones were a struggle. I didn’t feel particularly inspired tonight, but I’m happy with my progress.
It’s the end of the first week. I happened to have the day off today, so I was able to sleep in and get my writing done early and without rushing. Much more relaxing than yesterday.
NaNoWriMo is a distilled, compressed writing experience, and you can think of it just like a novel. The first week to the beginning, the central two weeks to the middle, and the last week to the end. Whether or not you actually try to cover the entire plot of a novel in the month, the process still maps pretty well, in my experience.
In the classic emotional arc of novel writing, week one is the fun, creative time where you’re free to invent and discover. Everything is new and shiny. In week two and three, the experience begins to dull, as you have to build a functional story on the foundations of character, setting and plot. In the final week, the end is in sight, and even if all the components of the book aren’t exactly coming together, you can at least take solace in the fact that the pain will be over soon.
Most books have at least a few moments in the process of writing when doubt or frustration crop up. Sometimes a book feels like a disaster in progress. The general agreement seems to be that those moments usually come in the middle, not so much at the beginning or end. So the start of week two begins to usher in the part of the month where a lot of the struggle happens. I’ve certainly felt that in previous years. We’ll see how it goes this time around.
Following up my previous post, I wanted to mention that you can actually add updates for specific days and/or delete updates on the NaNoWriMo website. You just have to do it from the “stats” page. This is nice for someone like me, who writes late at night and occasionally goes over midnight. Now I can make sure my word count applies to the right day.
Tonight was a rough one. I didn’t feel like writing, and it felt slow, even if it did end up being pretty on-pace compared to my previous sessions.
On the upside, I crossed 10,000 words. On the downside, I updated my count on the website one minute after midnight. Now I don’t think I’m going to get that “Daily Par Every Day” badge. And…sure, it’s just a stupid graphic on a website. It doesn’t really matter. But, assuming all goes well, I’m going to get to the end of the month and all those badges will light up like a Christmas tree. Except that one. Because I was one minute late. Oh well.
The actual book is going fine. Thanks to the 10,000 words I already had done before November, I’m approaching the end of Act I.
My strategy so far has been to write a paragraph or two beyond my “par” word count each day. This doesn’t feel like much, but I’m now about 850 words ahead. At this rate, I’ll have a spare day of wiggle room around Day 9. I also have some vacation later in the month, and I may use that to pad my word count a little further. That way if something comes up or I just feel burned out, I can afford to take a day off, or write a little less.
I wrote in two sessions today. The first was a bit of a slog. It was a lot of physical action as one character pursues another in a crowded building. I had to figure out exactly what each of them was doing, as well as the layout of the building. The second session was about twice as productive, and was mostly dialogue after the chase.
If I have anything like a hack for getting your NaNoWriMo word count, it’s this: use lots of dialogue. Dialogue is such a fast way to write a lot, and it’s a great way to develop characters, especially if you’re still trying to figure those characters out as you’re writing.
In my experience, most of the difficulties with dialogue come with editing it, once you realize you have unnecessary bits or need to rearrange things. Since dialogue has a natural flow to it, changing one thing can have a lot of knock-on effects. Luckily, that’s not a concern during NaNoWriMo. That’s a problem for future me!
I’m going to say something that probably seems obvious to writers who call themselves “pantsers” or “gardeners”—those who don’t plan/outline/prep extensively before starting a big writing project like a novel.
Having a very loose outline for this project has been…fun? I have more flexibility to just discover new ideas or characters and immediately weave them in. I have a few plot points I want to hit, and I can meander between them as much as I want.
The other thing I’ve noticed, not slavishly following a detailed outline, is that I’m writing faster. My recent point of comparison, of course, is Razor Mountain.
I spent something like a year and a half writing the “first draft” of Razor Mountain. I put “first draft” in quotes, because I was working from the most detailed outline I’ve ever made, and each chapter went through at least one round of edits (and often several) before I posted it. I wanted the story to be coherent and relatively free of plot holes, because I knew people would be reading it while I was writing it.
The downside is that I am now finished with that “first draft,” and I still need to edit and revise. I’m still going to end up cutting some things out and adding new things, along with lots of smaller edits. A better first draft is still a first draft, and some of the effort that went into making it better will be thrown away when those sections are cut or modified.
My weekly output during Razor Mountain was about equal to my daily par for NaNoWriMo. I will be writing the equivalent of 45% of Razor Mountain in November. Call it half of a first draft. But it’s going to be a much messier first draft. How much more will need to be rewritten or thrown away to make it good? I don’t know. Is it better to blast through that first draft as quickly as possible, knowing that it means more editing later?
The other aspect that I’ve been thinking about is sustainability. I accepted my slow cadence of two chapters per month on Razor Mountain because I decided I could keep it up indefinitely. My past experience with NaNoWriMo is that I’m usually pretty worn out at the end of November.
On the other hand, at this pace I could finish the first draft of a novel in two or three months. Even if I had quite a bit of revising to do, I could spend a year doing that and still finish faster than my Razor Mountain pace.
As usual, I’m probably over-thinking everything. After all, it’s only Day 4.
The words continue to come pretty quickly. Along with my main character, I’ve gotten to introduce a couple of interesting secondary characters. The second major character will enter the story in my Day 4 writing session. I initially thought that these two would be very buddy-buddy, but now I’m thinking that some tension between them would give me more opportunities to keep things interesting.
I am starting to enjoy and feel more comfortable with peeling back the layers of the world. I’m not terribly familiar with steampunk or its various punky offshoots, and I’m still figuring out what real world time period(s) and place(s) to draw from. I began with the default: Victorian England, but now I’m thinking about adding some more Eastern European elements into the mix. For now, I’m happy to pull in a mish-mash, even if they’re a bit anachronistic together, and see how it works out.
I’m also delighted to make it to Friday and catch up on some sleep.
Day 2 of NaNoWriMo, and I’m still feeling pretty good. Despite having a lot going on during the day and writing fairly late at night, I’ve been cranking through the word count.
Maybe it helps that my brain is worn down and isn’t trying to do as much editing as I write. Maybe it’s the fact that this session had more dialogue. Whatever it is, I got through the day’s words a full 30 minutes faster than Day 1.
I am very tired and looking forward to the weekend.
As is pretty normal for me, I was not as prepared as I had hoped to be. Life has been busy lately. I went into November with something more like a story summary than a scene-by-scene outline. But that’s fine.
Unfortunately, November 1 was a Wednesday this year, which might just be the worst day to start NaNoWriMo. Much better when it lands on a weekend. Ideally, Halloween would fall on a Friday or Saturday, and I could stay up late and do a little bit of midnight writing to kick things off.
As it was, I had to work all day and save my writing for the evening. I didn’t actually start writing until kids were in bed. Still, I started this year with the advantage of jumping into a story 10,000 words in. I already have a main character that I know something about, and some pre-existing tone and setting to build from.
The last time I participated in NaNoWriMo was before I had started this blog, and before I had started Razor Mountain. Before that, I was…inconsistent. I can definitely feel the difference, now that I’m in the habit of writing on a regular basis. 6-7 pages in a day is still a lot for me, but by not worrying too much about quality, I was able to bang it out in less than two hours.
In short, Day 1 went well, and I’m already tired and looking forward to the weekend.
This is the monthly post where I talk about what I’ve been reading. As usual, if you’re interested in any of these books, please use the included Bookshop.org links instead of Amazon. It helps independent bookstores, and I get a small affiliate commission.
Having finished rereading all the books in the main Sandman series, I figured I would top it all off with the two stand-alone Sandman volumes. The first of these is Dream Hunters, which was published three years after the 1996 wrap of the main series.
Dream Hunters comes in the form factor of a graphic novel, but it is actually an illustrated short story in five parts. There are a variety of different layouts, including many full page illustrations and some two-page paintings and both horizontal and vertical splits. There is even a double-fold-out illustration, four pages wide. Amano’s inks, pencils and watercolors mingle to create a variety of effects, sometimes clear, other times murky or abstract.
The story is a retelling of a Japanese folk tale, “The Fox, the Monk, and the Mikado of All Night’s Dreaming.” A magical fox falls in love with a lonely monk who maintains a small and forgotten shrine. When a powerful sorcerer tries to kill the monk in his dreams, the fox intercepts those dreams to protect him.
This is one of those classic Sandman side-stories where Dream is involved, but only as a side character. It’s a good story with great art, but not really necessary to pick up unless you’re already in love with the series.
Unlike Dream Hunters, Endless Nights is a proper comic. This is an anthology of stories, each with a different illustrator, and each one focused on one of the seven Endless: Death, Dream, Desire, Delirium, Destruction, Despair, and Destiny. Again, these could be considered side-stories to the main series, but they feel closer to the main series in tone and style, and they do offer a few interesting tidbits for die-hard fans.
Some light is shed on Dream and his interactions with Desire, when they attend a gathering of sentient stars some few billion years ago. We see what might be the first of Dream’s many ill-fated romances, and the source of animosity between Dream and Desire. We also get to see what Destruction is up to in his exile, and hints that he may yet reach a kind of friendly ambivalence with his family, even if they never quite see eye-to-eye.
I really like Endless Nights. If The Wake was the epilogue to the main story, then this feels like a reunion.
I continue to work through the series with my kids. This third book feels like the inflection point to me, still largely plotted in a way to appeal to relatively young kids, but beginning to ramp up the darker themes.
At this point, it’s clear there is something of a formula that the books follow. Again, it leans on couple of mysteries to keep the plot moving. Again, there is a red herring that is pushed hard. Where this book differs is in the long third act, which wraps everything up with a fun time-travel sequence that has to interweave with a series of events that we already read from a different point of view.
While it’s popular to knock the Harry Potter books these days, especially for their plot holes, the time travel opens up a pretty egregious one. Sure, as in Back to the Future, a big deal is made over the “dangers” of seeing yourself while time traveling. But then main characters do it anyway, and it turns out perfectly fine. Unlike Back to the Future, the Harry Potter books barely mention time travel again, which is a little hard to swallow.
I didn’t intend to read House of Leaves again. I was talking with my son about the Backrooms, and how it seemed like it was inspired by House of Leaves. I went to grab my slightly beat-up paperback copy and discovered that it wasn’t on the shelf. Then I remembered I had loaned it to a friend, years ago. So I ordered myself a new copy.
When the book arrived, I popped it open, just to enjoy the sections where the text went all wonky. I went back to the beginning, to see how it started. Before I knew it, I was fully absorbed. It’s probably been over ten years since I last read it, and there was a lot I had forgotten.
House of Leaves is a strange book. At its heart is a horror premise: a house that somehow contains an infinite, shifting, maze-like series of rooms and corridors, where one might become lost forever. Wrapped around that core are multiple layers of frame stories and linguistic complexity.
I could go on about this book, but it’ll have to wait for another post. Suffice to say that it’s just as enjoyable as I remembered, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading something genuinely weird.
What I’m Reading in November
With NaNoWriMo looming, I probably won’t be reading much. If I do get ahead and end up with some free time, I expect I’ll finally get back to The Witcher or delve into a new comics series.
As I mentioned last week, I’m hopping back onto the NaNoWriMo bandwagon this year. I’ve participated quite a few times, but for those who are participating for the first time, I thought I would give you some advice and resources for NaNoWriMo newcomers.
Nothing Really Matters Except for the Writing
Let’s get this out of the way up-front. All you need to do is write. Write 50,000 words of a single novel in the month of November, and you’ve won NaNoWriMo. And if you don’t want to do “traditional” NaNoWriMo, set yourself whatever goal you want.
NaNoWriMo is all about writing, so write in whatever way works for you. That said, most of my advice here assumes that you’re doing the standard event.
Set up Your Profile
NaNoWriMo started as a fun challenge among friends, and slowly expanded into the huge event it is now. Likewise, the NaNoWriMo website has evolved over the years to have quite a bit of functionality.
Once you’ve created a login, you have access to your personal profile and a few tools. None of this setup is really necessary to participate, but I find that it helps me to get excited about the event if I set up my profile.
First, under “My Nanowrimo,” you can create an “About me” section and select favorite books and authors. If you have friends doing NaNoWriMo, you can set them as your buddies. Under the “Groups” section, you can join your local writing group. There are groups for most decent-sized cities. If you’re in a rural area, there is probably a group that covers that part of your state. (If you’re not in the US…I’m not actually sure how good the international coverage is. You’ll have to search and find out.)
Create a Project
Under the “Projects” section of “My Nanowrimo,” you can enter some info about the book you plan to write. If you just signed up, the default settings will be for NaNoWriMo, but you can adjust the settings to whatever you want.
Picking a working title and an image to represent your project can be a fun non-writing way to get excited about your project. You can also look at the “Badges” section and award yourself personal achievement badges. There are badges to identify yourself as a planner, “pantser,” or something in-between, and a bunch of other badges for various little actions and achievements.
The badges under “Writing Badges” will be automatically awarded based on the word counts you upload to the site. If you enjoy earning badges, you should glance over these before November starts. To earn them all, you’ll need to write at least 1667 words per day in November, and you’ll need to update your stats on the website each day to earn credit toward badges.
Connect
There are forums under the “Community” section of the website, where you can chat with other participants and find like-minded writers. If you’re interested in meeting up and writing with people in real life, check out the section for your geographical region. People will often schedule events and get-togethers, although what’s available is going to depend a lot on the amount of participants in your area.
Offers
Since NaNoWriMo has become a big event, many companies that sell tools for writers will provide discounts or coupon codes for participants. You can check “Writer’s Resources -> Offers” to see what’s available.
These are typically not amazing deals, but if you’ve been thinking about buying a writing tool like Scrivener (a product I personally like a lot), you can get it a little cheaper by using these codes.
Preparation
While futzing around with your profile on the NaNoWriMo website can be a fun way to procrastinate, you’ll eventually want to get into the actual project. If you’re participating in the traditional NaNoWriMo, you can’t start actually writing until Halloween midnight, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some preparation before November.
If you’re the sort of writer who likes to outline, this is the most obvious way to prepare. Knowing what you want to write will allow you to hit the ground running. Whether you’re a planner or not, you’ll probably want to think about your characters’ personalities, your settings, and at least a starting point for the plot. NaNoWriMo is mostly about writing a lot of words in a short amount of time, and you’ll have an easier time writing a lot of words if you don’t have to regularly stop and figure out where the story needs to go next.
The most important thing is to find the aspects of the story that excite you. Why do you want to write this story? The more excited you are to write, the less grueling the process will feel. Most writers will regularly encounter frustrating sections in their work, but that excitement is the fuel that can keep you pushing forward when you’d prefer to close the laptop or notebook.
Apart from story considerations, you may want to think about writing logistics. If you don’t already write on a regular basis, it can pay to think about where you’re going to set up shop for the month. Do you plan on writing at a desk at home? The local coffee shop? Will you write on a computer, tablet, or notebook? When will you have time to write each day? Do you need to make adjustments in your schedule during November to ensure you have the time set aside?
If you haven’t been writing on a regular basis, you may not have a good idea of how long it will take you to write 1667 words. If you have the time and inclination, one or two practice sessions might give you a better idea of what you’re capable of. For some people, writing 6-7 double-spaced pages is no big deal. For many of us, it’s hours of work.
You may want to give a heads-up to your family or the people you live with. The event is a lot easier if they are aware of the time commitment you’ve made. These people can also be your biggest cheerleaders, even if they aren’t participating. And if they are participating, then you can support each other.
Psyche Yourself Up
At the most basic level, the strategy for success in NaNoWriMo is simple: start strong, and try to not miss any days.
To start strong, many participants like to join a midnight write-in or local event on November 1st. Late-night diners are common venues, but you can always attend a virtual write-in at the place of your choosing. The more you can boost your word count in the first couple days of the event, the more wiggle-room you’ll have for days where you struggle.
If you have days where you know you won’t be able to write (Thanksgiving is a common one for writers in the USA), you may want to try to write extra beforehand, so you won’t fall behind.
Don’t Forget to Have Fun
NaNoWriMo is a challenge, but it’s meant to be a fun one. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to fall into the trap of worrying about the goal and forgetting to enjoy the actual experience. Writing can be tough, but we do it because we get something out of it: self-expression, self-understanding, or the simple joy of bringing something new and unique into the world.
Are you participating in NaNoWriMo this year? What are you doing to prepare? Let me know in the comments.
