NaNoWriMo 2009 – Getting Started

So for the last two years I have participated in NaNoWriMo – or National Novel Writing Month. I’ve met a lot of great people, spent a lot of time in coffee shops in both the Seattle and New Orleans areas, and written two 50,000+ word novels. Well, did I?

Yes and no. I mean, in 2007 I filled three college ruled composition notebooks with double-spaced, both sides of the page handwriting. I spent a few hours each night writing in long hand and then part of each following day transcribing onto my computer, which allowed me to both edit as I went and add more content. I was at the 50,000 word goal mark of NaNoWriMo with about 7 days to spare, and I felt I was only halfway through the story. I kept writing. And then November ended, and the damn thing fizzled. I kept trying to get back to it, but I lost interest. The ending was in my head but it seemed nonsensical and pointless. The story was no good. But, hey, I wrote 50,000 words in one month. I won!

Last year I spent 10 days in New Orleans visiting friends, family, and working on a new novel. I had a clear goal – 50,000 words by the end of the month and have the damn story finished. It was another idea that I’d been kicking around, and I think for the most part it worked. I wrote out the whole story, start to finish, including all the crap I’d dreamed of throwing into a sci-fi neo-noir mythology piece. I finished at around 52,000 words. Awesomesauce. Except that I knew it needed more substance and I didn’t know what to do about that and three months later I lost all desire to finish it.

So I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that those first two manuscripts were exercises. I have proven a few things with them. First, I proved that I could dump out a ton of words in a shortish period of time. I wrote a novel back around 2000 that was probably close to 35,000 words – more a novella by current standards. That felt long, and was hard to do, but 50,000 doesn’t seem so bad anymore. This year, I want to push myself further. Second, I proved that I can recognize that what I write isn’t ready for publication and needs work after the initial draft. Sounds daft – trivial, really – but I’ve never enjoyed the work of editing or rewriting. I need to focus on that in the phase that we November writers affectionately refer to as ‘post-NaNo’. Third, well, I have good ideas, but I need to make them great stories. This means going outside of comfort zones. The story I have to tell this year is going to be ridiculous.

I don’t know how I’m going to get away with this one. Racism, occupation of American soil, domestic terrorism, revenge, torture. Every time I think about it I get excited, and in a scary way. I think that’s a good thing. I’m going for a post-modern day Count of Monte Cristo with a touch of Southern Gothic horror. But I have a few of my recent writing rules to break first.

1 – My goal is 120,000 words. This is some sort of magic number. I’ll be happy if it ends up after that initial goal at least 100,000 words. I think 2007’s novel was getting close to that point. It’s doable.

2 – But I think it’s unreasonable to restrict myself to the month of November. I don’t want to finish at the end of the month, although that would be nice. But I also don’t want to start on November 1. To that effect, I’ve started today. I know this breaks the idea of NaNoWriMo, but guess what – I’m done with NaNoWriMo.

3 – Well, not really. But the point of NaNo is to get people writing. Get people to put pen and idea to paper. That’s not my problem. My problem isn’t getting words down, it’s making my story what it needs to be. I’m still going to attend Write Ins, and I’m still going to shoot for 50,000 words during November. That means at most 70,000 words should happen before/after November.

4 – Where am I now? Well, not very far. 1,290 words is around 1% of my goal. Look:

I’m going to run this during the entire process of writing the novel. I got the script from Cherie M Priest’s blog. I’m using it because it’s free, easy, and the developer did it in Rails, so that makes me happy. Once November hits, I’ll use the widgets from the official site to have a side-by-side. If I don’t make 50K for the month, I won’t win, even if my total novel word count is over that number. I’m an honest person.

5 – I’m going to blog again about the process. I did this a bunch in 2007 through HollowedOut.com (don’t bother, it just redirects here). I’d like to find some nice WordPress tools for posting meaningful data. And finally,

6 – I’m abandoning WrimoStats.com for the time being. I haven’t had any time to work on it, and I really just want to focus on my novel. At this point it’s nowhere near where I want it, and I don’t want to spend all November messing with errors and other issues that are inevitable, even with a full test suite.

Thanks WordPress, I see I’ve written over 900 words here that could have been spent on my novel. Awesome.

Later. -Joshua