NaNoWriMo – Words Deferred

PerShoStoWriMo

It’s November, and you know what that means. It’s the month when a bunch of writers try to string 50,000 words together into something almost, but not entirely unlike a novel.

Over the years, NaNoWriMo has grown from a thing that more and more people do to a full-fledged nonprofit corporation with a website and forums and programs and email lists. Somewhere in that process, it has become apparent that this organization has a penchant for saying and doing some questionable things. The most recent controversies involved a moderator grooming minors on the forums, and a statement on AI that suggested that any stance against AI-generated writing was ableist and exclusionary.

NaNoWriMo, the Unnecessary Organization

Thankfully, we still live in a world where pretty much everyone agrees that child-predators are the scum of the earth, and the forum debacle resulted in the whole forum more or less being shut down and a major shakeup in the organization.

The statement on AI, unsurprisingly to everyone except the people making it, did not go over well with the core NaNoWriMo demographic of people who like to write things themselves. It resulted in little more than a bunch of grumpy articles across the web, a quiet backtracking of the original stance, and a response from the NaNoWriMo organization that amounted to “Oh, guys, we didn’t mean it like that.“

Rather than write my own screed about how dumb this is, I’ll just point to a pair of rants by Chuck Wendig: one about the NaNoWriMo thing in particular, and another about the problems of generative AI. I agree with about 90% of what he says on this topic, and he’s just really good at channeling angry outbursts into blog form.

I’ve done my best to ignore the NaNoWriMo organization’s antics in recent years, but I think I’m finally done with them. What will I miss out on? A not-entirely terrible online word count tracker and a Discord that I never use? It seems clear that NaNoWriMo works pretty well as a thing people do, and not so well as an organization. So let’s treat it that way from now on.

PerShoStoWriMo

This year, I’m not writing a novel, or even something vaguely similar. No, it’s my Year of Short Stories, and I’m going to spend the month attempting to write 50,000 words of short stories. To get in the proper spirit, I’ve christened the month with a new, even more insane pseudo-acronym. It’s my Personal Short Story Writing Month: PerShoStoWriMo.

The advantage of a novel-sized story idea is that I generally don’t run out of plot in 50,000 words. I write sci-fi and fantasy, where 100,000-word novels are considered to be a bit on the short side. But when it comes to short stories, I try to actually stay on the short end of the spectrum. This poses a big question.

How many stories am I going to have to write to hit 50,000 words?

I don’t know, but I can make some educated guesses. If we ignore microfiction, my stories range from around 1400 words to 6500 words. The halfway point in that range is about 4000 words, and while I probably write more stories on the shorter end of the spectrum, I also tend to write long drafts and pare them down in editing.

So, to meet my goal, I’ll most likely have to write 10-15 stories.

Hmm. It sounds a little insane when I say it like that. I’ve written fewer stories over the past year. Still, those other stories were properly edited, then critiqued, then edited again. There will be no editing this month. That goes against the ethos of PerShoStoWriMo.

I do have a few short story ideas lined up or in progress. I’ve talked about The Vine, Portrait of the Artist in Wartime, and The Scout, and I’ve got one or two others rattling around in the back of my head. I also have a secret project in the works, and this will result in another couple of stories, at least.

An Exciting November

All in all, this PerShoStoWriMo thing feels right. It’s got a ridiculous name, it will force me to get a bunch of writing done, and it’s right on the edge of what feels possible.

I’ll keep you posted throughout the month, and we’ll see how it goes.

Are you doing any writing challenges in November? Let me know in the comments.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 30 Wrap-up

November is over, and so is NaNoWriMo. If you participated, I hope it was fun and you hit your target word count.

If you’re new to NaNoWriMo, it’s worth noting that it’s more than just the big November event. The “Now What?” Months are January and February, where participants are encouraged to finish, revise, or work toward publishing their NaNoWriMo novel. Camp NaNoWriMo happens in April and July, and encourages pursuing more flexible goals, whether that be starting a new project, finishing an existing one, working on editing, or whatever you like.

There is also the unofficial community tradition of NaNoEdMo, when some ‘WriMo-ers try to get in 50 hours of editing (or however much you feel like) in March. Unfortunately, while there have been several fan-maintained sites in the past, they all appear to be defunct. However, the NaNoWriMo website can still be used to create a new project for the month. Just set a goal of 50 “words” and treat them as hours of editing, or set it to 3000 “minutes” if it feels better to have a bigger, more granular number.

I’m currently thinking I will try to finish my NaNoWriMo 2023 project in one of the Camp NaNoWriMo months, but for now I want to get back to some other things, like revisions on Razor Mountain. I’m also thinking about new big project for 2024.

Thanks for hanging out with me this November. I’ll see you all in December, when I get back to my regularly scheduled programming.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 29

Writing Time: 00:45
Session Word Count: 972
Total Word Count: 50110 (48333 par)

I had a light session today to hit my 50,000 words. Success!

Purely in terms of hitting my word count every day, NaNoWriMo 2023 felt pretty good. Some days were certainly easier than others, but I only missed my quota on a single day, and my strategy of writing a little extra each day meant that I never fell behind and I was able to finish a day early. Now I can spend the final hours of November doing some wrap-up and jotting down notes for the next time I work on this project—because it’s definitely not done, and I’m going to set it aside for now.

The story itself feels like a mixed bag, but that’s generally how I feel about any work in progress. This one will definitely be a rougher first draft than Razor Mountain, because I went into it with less of an outline and followed a few tangents that may or may not make it into the final product. I do feel like I was able to discover a few important elements of the story that will become important, so I feel good about that.

Blogging through every single day of NaNoWriMo was surprisingly fun. I didn’t exactly plan to do it, but once I started, it felt right to keep going. It never really felt like an extra burden, and it was nice to talk about what I was working on. Somehow, even though I’ve been reflecting on the writing process in this blog for several years, I’m still caught by surprise when it ends up being useful.

It helped that these were easy entries to write. They were much shorter than my usual posts and completely off the cuff. I was honestly surprised by how many people came back most days to read them. If you’re one of those people, leave a comment and let me know what you thought.

This was the most posts I’ve written in a month by a huge margin, but don’t expect me to keep it up. Next month I’m going back to my usual style of fewer, slightly longer posts.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 28

Writing Time: 01:30
Session Word Count: 1728
Total Word Count: 49138 (46667 par)

I got an earlier start tonight, but I’m feeling burned out. I’m glad the end is approaching, because I would have a hard time keeping this pace indefinitely. However, I used to find it almost impossible to write every day, or even on a regular basis; so I’ve apparently improved.

This session was heavy on the main character sneaking around. He has now encountered some of the villain’s henchmen, and I decided to dress them in classic black uniforms with red armbands. Sure, it’s a hacky shorthand for bad guys, but that’s okay. One of the inspirations is James Bond, and that series has no shortage of ostentatious, over-the-top villains and henchmen. In fact, maybe I should lean into that even more than I have been.

I was really excited at this late point in the month to accidentally come across a story element that I really like—an aesthetic for the magic. I’m starting to think this magic is less like classic high-fantasy wizards or D&D and more eldritch. It’s an invading force that isn’t compatible with the “normal” world. Doing serious magic twists the laws of physics, and physics gets really pissed off about that.

This introduces a fun element of side-effects to big spells, which is that the world produces an opposing force in response to them. You might be able to throw a fireball, but it drops the temperature in the room by a hundred degrees. You could bend space and walk through a solid wall, but the house might split in half.

So, happy with my progress and tired out, I decided it wasn’t worth it to push through the final 1000 words tonight. I should have an easy time hitting my 50000 tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 27

Writing Time: 01:15
Session Word Count: 1716
Total Word Count: 47410 (45000 par)

Today I went back to work after a week and a half of vacation. I put off writing until after the kids were in bed, and then slogged through it. It was rough. Obvious NaNoWriMo life-hack: if you have an “ordinary” 9:00-5:00 job, take some vacation in November. It makes the writing a lot less stressful when you have more time and energy to do it.

My characters have now split apart to go do separate investigations, each on a separate island. One will fall out of the narrative for the remainder of my November writing as I follow the other. He’s exploring the island where he’ll spend a good chunk of the rest of the book.

This was one of those “connective tissue” sections of the book, where characters need to get places and certain things need to happen, but I have to admit, it wasn’t as interesting as I would have liked. Another place where revision will be required. For now though, as tired as I am, I’m just happy to get my quota.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 26

Writing Time: 01:15
Session Word Count: 1724
Total Word Count: 45694 (43333 par)

In today’s session, my characters survived their watery journey and had a heart-to-heart chat. This is another case where I like the general shape of the emotional beats, but I’m going to have to go back and add more lead-up to this conversation so that it makes sense and feels meaningful.

Since I’m more than a day ahead on word count, 50,000 words feels very close at hand. I can try to go hard and finish in two days, or take it easy and finish in three. Unlike some previous years, this has been a fun and relatively low-stress NaNoWriMo, and I’ve managed to stay ahead the entire time. If that takes some of the drama out of my own personal NaNoWriMo plot arc…well, I’m okay with that.

This November has also reminded me of the aspects of NaNoWriMo that I enjoy, and I think I’m going to start participating more regularly again. I might even check out some of the other NaNoWriMo events throughout the year.

Maybe most interestingly, I’ve been reminded of the fun of being a little less rigorous about my writing prep, and I’ll be taking that into my future projects.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 25

Writing Time: 01:20
Session Word Count: 1835
Total Word Count: 43970 (41667 par)

The great gift of NaNoWriMo is a simple goal with no value judgements.

I once read that in order to be a writer, you need to develop a sort of schizophrenic mindset, where you simultaneously have complete faith in your work, but also see every single flaw. This is so you don’t give up on writing altogether, but you’re still driven to edit and polish until it’s as good as possible. It can be incredibly hard to keep that balance. If you’re anything like me, on a given day you probably fall more into one camp than the other. I don’t find a happy medium so much as vacillate wildly between extremes.

NaNoWriMo says, “turn that editor off.” Neil Gaiman’s glib description of writing is, in this case, perfectly correct: “You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done.” At the end of the month, you may not have a good story or a complete story, but you’ve at least got a brand new collection of 50,000 words in an order that nobody has ever arranged them before. It’s an ephemeral and somewhat arbitrary achievement, but hey, so is finishing a marathon or eating seventy hot dogs in a sitting, and we celebrate those.

Today’s session followed yesterday’s thoughts about causing more trouble for my characters. Sure, they’re already swimming between islands in a thick fog that prevents them from seeing the shore, but in the spirit of really ruining their day, I had them nearly run over by a ferry boat. They lost a pack and the compass that was helping them stay on course, and got split up. Now we’re having a good time.

I didn’t plan for these problems, so I’m off the edge of the map at the moment. I’ll have to figure out how to resolve them before I can continue with the plot as planned. Should be fun.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 24

Writing Time: 01:45
Session Word Count: 1843
Total Word Count: 42135 (40000 par)

On Day 7, I talked about how the middle of NaNoWriMo, like the middle of the book, tends to be the hardest part. Good news: the middle is over. We’re down to the final week. The finish line is in sight. If you’re participating and you’ve been struggling, don’t give up now. You’ve got this.

It’s also a good time to start thinking about what happens at the end of NaNoWriMo. Will you wrap up the story, or only finish the first 50,000 words? For my novel, I only expect to be about halfway done by the end of November. (And by “done,” I mean halfway through the plot, not through the actual writing process.) After November, I plan to write up some notes while they’re fresh in my mind, and set it aside to finish later—maybe during a different NaNoWriMo event.

At the end of this session, I left my characters swimming in cold water, in the fog, between islands that they’re not familiar with. One of my writing challenges is that I’m not very good at putting challenging obstacles in the way of my characters. My instinct is to set up problems that I know they can solve with the skills they have. I’m trying to remedy that. With my sketchy outline, that mostly means dropping the characters into bad situations, and then trying to figure out how they would get out of them in unexpected or interesting ways.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to get them to a new island, and maybe get to the point of revealing the antagonist that has been hinted at for most of the book, but not yet appeared.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 23

Writing Time: 01:10
Session Word Count: 1811
Total Word Count: 40292 (38333 par)

For my American readers, happy Thanksgiving! No surprise, I spent most of the day preparing and eating food, and spending time with family. I got to my writing after I put the kids to bed. This session, I was strictly going for speed so I wouldn’t have to stay up too late, and I succeeded pretty well. I don’t think the quality of the writing suffered too much for it, although I may change my mind when I come back to this part later on.

My characters have finished their information gathering, and escaped before they could be caught. Now they need to get to a different island to try to find the antagonist and his goon squad. But that’s a problem for tomorrow.

NaNoWriMo 2023 — Day 22

Writing Time: 01:30
Session Word Count: 2064
Total Word Count: 38481 (36667 par)

I wrote close to the bare minimum yesterday, but I really wanted to get back to the point where I was a full day ahead of par. So I started earlier today and closed the gap, plus a little extra.

My characters are on one of the prison islands—one hidden and one posing as a new trainee guard. They know that they’ll eventually be found out for impersonating the real trainee, so they’re gathering information and planning to sneak off before the powers-that-be catch up with them.

Impersonating a trainee provides the opportunity to get a basic understanding of how things work on the islands and within the prison system, as well as in the mines where many of the prisoners are forced to work. This surface-level understanding will eventually be complicated as they uncover some of the more nefarious things going on.

Next session, I’ll engineer their escape and journey to a different island, where things really start to get dangerous for them.