Another Draft, Courtesy of National Novel Writing Month

At the end of October, inspired by some fellow writers, I decided to use NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month: a challenge wherein writers the world over attempt to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days — to rewrite the novel I’ve been working on for a while now. I’d made very little progress in months, so the idea was that NaNo would get me back into it and, just as importantly, get me back to writing every day.

And it worked, because now I have a new draft. I ended up writing an average of 1800 words a day, anywhere between 300 and 800 words in the morning and then another 1000 to 1400 words in the evening. On my best day, I wrote just under 2200 words.

A challenge like this is really useful to get quickly back into the habit of writing. The momentum of something new and yet familiar (since I already knew something about my story and characters) helped get me over that initial hump of getting started, and then the rest was simply stubbornness (and a constant awareness of my word count) to make sure I got my words in for the day.

The daily word count goal was exactly the kind of motivation I needed. When I used to write every day in a single morning session, I could maybe write 1000 words, but usually less, so I didn’t think it was going to be easy. (Unlike lots of people, though, most of my non-working time is my own, so I have it much easier than most.) But I found that most days it didn’t take much to get there — mostly just sitting down with my laptop, opening the document, and continuing where I left off, no matter how unequal I felt to getting down what was supposed to happen next. Near the end of the month, there were a few days where I had the fleeting thought about not bothering to get to 1667 that day because I was tired and just wanted to go to bed (at, you know, 8pm) and was ahead of my overall goal anyway, but then I would look at the little graph of my daily progress on the NaNo Stats page and power through.

I wrote this entirely as a fresh draft and only went back to my old drafts and notes to remind myself of the names of minor characters. I kept a small list of scenes at the end of the document that outlined where I still had to go. It was helpful to see where I was heading next and steer myself in that direction. The story went to a few unexpected places, but I think what this draft did more than anything else was narrow the timeline (from a whole summer down to one week) as well as the setting and story enough to spend more time with the (many!) characters themselves and figure out what was going on with them.

One of the best things I did with this draft was not write about anything from the perspective of the character who appears at the centre of the story. Previously he’d gotten quite a bit of his own page time, but I could never settle on how to portray him. For this round, I decided I wasn’t going to get into his head at all. I like that it forced me to figure out how to show who he is from the perspective of other characters. I didn’t get it right, but I liked the path it started me down, narrowing my focus a bit and letting me spend more time with other characters.

The next stage is a bit of a black hole, of course, because I’m terrible at revising. So far I plan to write out the outline of what I have, compare it to the outlines from my last couple of drafts, and try to create a bit more structure on which to hang the material I have spread out over some 150,000 words. There are elements I can bring together, and there’s a lot to throw away. And then, maybe, in bits and pieces, I’ll get some other eyeballs on it? I’m thinking a lot about why I’m still reluctant to let other people read it and trying to put into words what I want (and don’t want) from early readers. It’s scary but it’s good.

Some additional reading about NaNoWriMo to get thinking about next year: 20 years of NaNoWriMo, two vital reminders for writing a novel, why word count matters, and the best writing advice for NaNoWriMo.