What I Learned From NaNoWriMo

Dear NaNo,

When I gave you (and later your more flexible incarnation CampNaNo) a chance, I thought as you and I would race down toward that haloed goal of 50K words, we would cross the finish line and ride into the sunset hand in hand together. Well, that’s before counting on the engine breakdown and innumerable flats after we’d barely begun our soon-to-be disastrous journey of doom.

Sadly NaNo, you and I were never meant to be. It’s you, it’s not me. And yes, this is my break-up notice.

Yours untruly etc. etc.

Remember that last time I said I was doing NaNoWriMo in an effort to finish my novel? Guess what? It didn't go well.

I'm not saying that NaNo is useless. In fact, it's a pretty neat tool for writers. For people who struggle to write without a deadline or some kind of do-or-die motivation, NaNo supplies that missing fuel to power them through an ugly first draft by pushing their dreaded inner editor off the bus and running them over. That's right, NaNo is like a freakin' coach ride where pesky things like inner editors, laundry and showering get shamelessly left behind.

The pros:

• The word count stats are awesome. Especially when your word count is progressing and you get an estimate date of when you could finish that novel.
• The writing community. You're not alone or writing in a vacuum. There are hundreds of thousands of writers across the world struggling as hard as you to pour 50K words out of them by the end of the month. You can add writing buddies to accompany you on this journey and offer some much needed support to each other and also keep track of others' word counts.
• The endless writing resources. Throughout the entire experience, NaNo's superhero staff sends you links to various online resources to help you finish your novel or often, a much needed word of encouragement (otherwise known as sanity-saving moral support).
• The weekly pep talks by pubbed writers sharing their experiences and advice (the BEST PART in my opinion!)

The cons:

• The stress, man so much stress. (That's what broke NaNo for me after a few days of trying.)
• The purpose of NaNo is to write a substantial word count really hard and really fast. Whether those words are actually usable or not is another kettle of fish.

It's Been Awhile...

I feel like I've abandoned this blog. I should be charged with gross blog neglect. So, where was I?

Right. I've been in a huge writing slump since the beginning of the year (since last year actually). And I've tried to motivate myself. Tried is the keyword here.

To start with, I created a "Working" notebook for my current novel (yes, it's the same one since I started this blog back in the mid-2012, so...gulp?) to generally organize my ideas about the novel and jot down new ideas as they occur to me, including bits and pieces of conversations between characters. It's helpful, it is. It helps me figure out the story little by little. But I still don't have a complete novel. So, my guess is it only works partially?

Then, I created a "Writing Journal" on my laptop to track my progress on said current novel . And I gave myself pep talks in each entry before each writing session. The pep talks didn't last very long and weren't very effective.

Next, I created a "Story Ideas" notebook, which works great for generating ideas, but not for THIS novel because it hates me (more on the aforementioned notebook in a future post - Sidenote: Dear Future Me, if you don't write that post, I will kick your ass.)

Finally, I created an "On Writing" notebook, which contains the greatest writing quotes EVER by authors I love, to motivate me to write. I know, I do love my notebooks (I know what you're thinking right now because I can read your mind). But again, maybe this isn't enough.

So, I have to ask myself: what in this world is enough?!

The answer may be simpler than all the stuff I've tried. It's simply sitting down and writing the damn book. I know this works. I know this works dammit.

And now, I'm actually doing NaNoWriMo in an effort to FINISH this godforsaken novel (I chickened out at the last minute and instead of starting something fresh and new, I decided to give said current novel a go because dammit).

I actually kind of know what happens next now that almost all the major characters (almost all) have made their spectacular (or not-so-spectacular) entry and I'm getting a handle on their motivation and stuff. So, onward (I actually typed "onword" before editing, so maybe that's a sign?).

It's just occurred to me that maybe what I've been trying to do with my notebooks is simply searching for inspiration and I know for a fact that inspiration lies in actually just doing the work (because it likes to find us working when it comes).

That's all for now, folks! I'll go and try to slightly raise my pathetic word count so far.

How To Not Plot A Novel

I’m basically writing a novel where I don’t know what happens next as I write each scene. For anyone writing seriously, this is terrifying. I touched on this before in this rambling post about finding the story.

Why don’t I just plot beforehand, you ask? Plotting just doesn’t work for me. I attempted it painstakingly before (on a very different version of the current novel) and the storyline in question became so contrived and ARTIFICIAL that I just lost interest in it and chucked it. I don't regret the wasted words though, because they taught me how not to write this story.

As hard as I try to plot my current novel from start to finish or even the next few chapters, it just WON’T HAPPEN. But wait. Stop. Do I need to plot at all?

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow

Here’s the thing. I find that plot germinates from scene to scene. This means that with each decision I make on the page concerning my characters and important story elements, this impacts how the story will unfold later on.

Though I don’t outline my chapters before writing them, I do outline them afterwards so I can keep track of what has happened so far in the story. An outline is just life-saving when you temporarily stop working on a story to focus on something else and then decide to come back to it months later.

Also, when I’m in the middle of writing a scene, I tend to get ideas of things that may happen in future scenes and I make a point to jot them down so I can explore them later. And Mr. Picasso makes a very important point here:

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso

When I’m working on a story, I’m always thinking about it even during the time when I’m not actually writing the story. And this is when I tend to get revelations about so-and-so character and discover plot holes.

Sometimes, I find that there are several possible pathways down which my story could develop. In that case, I try out a couple of experimental versions (even if there is a chance that I might not keep it) until I find one that works for the story. And I never know where each version could lead me, but all I know is that it could lead me to someplace I never expected to find (Sparta! Or you know. Someplace cool).

Even discarded scenes are not a complete waste of words (and time) because maybe there are elements, bits of descriptions or even entire characters that might be worth keeping. In fact, an important character from my current novel emerged that way (from an experimental storyline that I’m not keeping).

At some point, it occurred to me that the only way to finish writing this book is to keep writing it until it's done.

Recently, I came across invaluable writing advice by the brilliant Timothy Hallinan and apparently, he doesn't outline.

Also, here's a hilarious post about writing a novel: The Nine Stages of Dating a Novel by Tahereh Mafi (a guest post on Nathan Bransford's blog).

P.S. I'm in the grovelling stage right now. Hundred more Word pages to go, before I finish some semblance of a first draft (or should I say "experimental" draft? O_o).

Finding The Story

Stories are found things...relics...

Once upon a time, I started a novel, dumped it after sometime and started all over again...only to dump the second version (pretty much permanently) and rewind to the original version. Why? Because the original story elements wouldn't leave me alone. Why again? Because there is a reason behind this (which I didn't realize only until recently).

After returning to the original version of said novel, I've been struggling A LOT with it from Chapter 4 onward. Let me decrypt that. By "struggling", I mean that I wrote scenes that did practically nothing to move the story forward, only to chop them off, backtrack and then do it all over again.

It's like doing a step dance from writer-hell (wait, a céilidh dance?), where I go two steps forward but one and a half steps backward. Then after a while of doing that dance, I took a step back from the novel and asked myself: what the hell* are you trying to do? And this was when I had something of a light bulb moment: I'm trying to find the story.

More specifically, I'm trying to find the true form of the story, not just a phantom of that story. And for that, I have to be willing to explore uncertain avenues and dig in unlikely places.

As of now, I don't know the whole story. I know what kind of story I want to tell (or at least I think I know) and I know some of its core elements. But I don't know all of its core elements. And this is what I'm really trying to do: find the missing elements so that I can connect the dots and draw the whole picture.

And lo and behold, the brilliant Laini Taylor just did a fantastic post about her writing process, which she likens to a dance between the known and the unknown. This woman. She must be divine or something. In her post, she talks about how she doesn't outline her stories before writing them simply because she doesn't know what's going to happen beforehand and she also mentions the terror that accompanies her process.

Writing Blues

Okay, so three months are nearly up (that's the length of time I originally gave myself to find out if I could really write or not) and its evaluation-time for me. So far, I've written around 21K for an aborted version of Harper and another 23K for Harper Reloaded. The thing is, after my so-called epiphany, I rushed blindly into the story again and though I came up with much more action and originality than I thought I was capable of, things sort of started to fizzle out about the end of Chapter 4...meaning I started running out of ideas - sounds familiar to me because that's exactly what happened with Harper version 1 before I decided to drop it and start over.

Four Weeks Into It - Writing Issues

Dear Diary,

I'm drowning. It's been four weeks since I've been laboring over a YA that I started ages back. And I want to throw something or someone from a bridge. Okay, not literally. Not a diary person.

Bye Diary

Anyway, I've been working on my first novel for the last month and I'm neck deep in a boat of trouble. All I've got so far is a prologue and four chapters (about 21K words) of a fantasy YA. And I'm stuck. Because I don't have a plan. That's right, I don't and I'm reading up on stuff and doing some research so I can save the damn story.