Postmortem on the writing experiment

This should be the last #nanowrimo related blog post for at least ten months, which means it might run a little long. I’d like to go over my tips and observations from #nanowrimo. Then I plan on washing my hands of it for a while and getting back to what I do in this blog – random posts about work and writing 🙂

Tricks

Research

I know it sounds trivial, but the last thing you want is to find yourself in the middle of nanowrimo spending a week trying to figure out how something should work in your novel. Now I realize nanowrimo isn’t supposed to be about consistency or congruity, but the internal critic just won’t let me put things down that don’t at least sound plausible to me. It just won’t. You can write works that counter previous statements, but I just can’t says something without feeling safe with it the first time. So I did a lot of research on extrasolar planets that have been discovered. I researched the cultures that I wanted to see butt heads in my story, or at least an extrapolation of those cultures. I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out dates, especially in relation to subjective time versus sidereal time for ships approaching light speed, as well as how long do you think it will be before we can do X. Now I know, a lot of people like to look at the progress made in the last century compared to the one before it and try and infer that in another hundred years we’ll be all STNG. But I don’t think you can say that in fifty years we’ll all be living around Jupiter, jetting around in our antigravity quantum propulsor ships. But if you take that same lens and realistically look at how long its been since we were last standing on the moon, you know that realistically we will be lucky if we have a colony on the moon, let alone mars, in sixty years. So I tried to keep a bit of realism in my dates, which is why my story takes place almost five hundred years in the future. Now, there’s some magic in my story on how we get as far as we do get, but hey, it’s science fiction, and magic is allowed so long as you cloud it well enough with technology 😉

100 words

The 100 word trip came from Toby Buckell’s blog. I don’t know about you, but for me, a 100 words is just a couple of sentences, a paragraph at most. Meh, I can do that. So I tried to give it an extra spin. My target was 100 words, but my goal was to end in a number with 0’s.Which means I’d try for a 100 words, but if I got 130 words, then I needed to get 200 words. If I got 206 words, then I needed to get to 300, and so on. Little tiny leap starts really go a long way to hitting a target when you just feel dried out of words before you begin. Its like working with a dried out fountain pen – first few strokes you’re just scratching at the paper, but once the ink starts to flow through the nib, you end up with hand cramps trying to keep the ink from smearing.

Voice recorder

This trick is actually how I managed to do the last half of the first 50k of the novel. Granted, my commute is a little atypical in that I have an hour drive each way. But since I work at the awesomest place in the Geekverse, working there is well worth the drive. That and when we bought our house, that’s where we could afford to buy it, and at the time it made sense. Now that’s an hour each way with just me and my thoughts in the car. I’d find myself thinking of great bits of dialog, or how unwritten scenes should play out, with no way of saving it. Then I’d spend the next forty minutes hoping I’d hit traffic just so I could have a chance to write down enough in my notebook to cue my memory between brake slams. But that doesn’t work well in the end, especially with it being dark so early half the year.

So instead, I have this real crappy MP3 player that was real awesome in its day, about five or ten years ago. It’s not great, I don’t use it often to listen to things because its a PITA to get mp3’s on to it, but it has a nifty voice recorder built in that works wonders. It turns out about five to ten minutes of voice recording pans out to a few thousand words when I go to flesh it out on screen. Gold.

Excel spreadsheet

Another gem from Toby’s blog (I swear, he doesn’t pay me for this) was the spreadsheet mentioned in the comments section here. I’m no excel fan or junkie, but the spreadsheet is nice, and I just love me a pretty graph that adjusts itself automagically as I recorded my word progress. Seeing that graph inch up was just beutiful.

Final Trick

Write. Just keep writing.

Observations and thoughts

Following the end of nanowrimo, I’ve seen a few people comlain. They’ll never do it again; it’s a gimick; a real novel isn’t 50,000 words, a real novel is at least 100,000 words minimum; anything you write in under 30 days is most likely unusable.

I’m not going to quite counter what they say, because its true. 50,000 words does not a novel make. What you write in 30 days is going to require a lot of proof reading, rewriting, editing, rewriting, proofing, editing, rewriting, before you’re ready to give it someone to tell you what you need to edit.

There’s also the argument that 30 days isn’t enough to make this a habit. I have to agree with that. I read an article this week that the “21 days to your new habit” was actually made up by a plastic surgeon turned self proclaimed psychologist in the 1960’s.As far as aphroisms go, I agree that its not enough time, and certainly not universal. It varies from topic to topic and person to person. Let’s face it – its been almost 3 weeks since I turned in my word count for nanowrimo and how much more have I written to it? A few thousand words here, then I went off to do a short story that took place in the same universe that it turns out really is just a subplot of the novel, but even with all of that – I’m still only at 54/55k. Not great progress, certainly not like the weeks where I was pushing out 10+k.

Will I do nanowrimo again? Yeah, probably. Because although it is a gimick, although it doesn’t make it a habit, although I have to find a way to stop making excuses (they’re not even good excuses), I think nanowrimo does serve a purpose. For 30 days, you actually take the time to focus on writing. Now if I could just do that again, even in half, the rest of the year, I’d be golden.

Oh, and the beard? Still have it. I’ve amended the original agreement to be until I finish the novel, or until I’m published. I’m working towards both, albeit slowly, but its a worthy goal I think.