I hit 50K on November 29th, which is to my knowledge the earliest I’ve hit the goal for month. I try to pace myself during November.
Lessons Learned
I have learned that the weekends and writing don’t really mix, and I decided early on that any future writing schedule I keep will remove the weekends unless there’s a special occasion. First, OryCon always happens in November (well, most of the time) and this year I managed to write in the hotel even though there was no official NaNoWriMo writealong. Thanksgiving, of course, is a big thing in some families. This year my Thanksgiving was quiet and full of house cleaning. We had an emergency guest Thursday night and spent several days that week preparing, and spent Friday with them most of the day. But weekends are really tough to get in a session.
I am surprisingly a pretty good morning writer. At work I feel like I’m at my peak creativity between 3 and 7pm, and it sucks that I frequently work those hours. But the morning sessions are pretty good for me. It’s another reason why the weekends don’t work for me, because Saturday morning already has tradition in my house, and Sunday morning is usually an 8am call time for church. My best writing hour is between 7;30 and 8:30, sometimes it pushes back to 8 to 9, and then I have to go to work. I work in a multi-national corporation and I’m on the west coast, so I am one of the last people to get to work during the day.
My goal for NaNoWriMo was to finish things and I didn’t. I started more than I finished, so I only added to my problem. I have plenty of plots, but very few stories, and that’s been the bugaboo of my writing career.
The Story Engine and Deck of Worlds decks have been very fun to work with, but I think I need to change my approach with them. They are very good at getting a start, but all it gives me is plot and setting. I’ve had fun with them, don’t get me wrong. It’s great to know that I can just grab five cards and things just start flowing, but it’s only the plot. It’s not a story.
For example, I pulled a prompt that hinted at a scene between two characters, and I wrote twelve scenes and 15K words just to get there, and by the time I did I was kind of bored with it and I didn’t have the energy to keep going, so I went somewhere else. This is the exact opposite of finish stories.
So what was the original plan? Finish my unfinished drafts. There is a Story Engine expansion pack aimed at role-playing games more than fiction, I think. It has a general title, a quick problem, and then has prompts to flush out details from either the Story Engine or Deck of Worlds. Several months ago I pulled one and fleshed out the details using the fantasy expansion, and I had planned on doing the same thing with the science fiction expansion. I started the fantasy story several months ago but didn’t finish it, but at least I think I know the ending. I started NaNo with the science fiction version of the tale. It came out at about 10K words in the first five days. I was pretty happy with it. Then I tried to go back to the fantasy story and I just couldn’t do it. Instead of doing the smart thing and reading what I had started and then continuing the story, I tried to start the story fresh and I couldn’t find the spark, so that only lasted one day.
I didn’t learn the lesson. Instead of going through my list and reading another story I needed to finish, I pulled a circle of fate prompt from the story engine deck and spent 15k words just trying to get through the necessary backstory. I only paused once to work on a flash piece inspired by one of the panels at OryCon. But this story petered out.
On November 21 I pulled a simple prompt and decided to try something “small” and it started another Murdock Collins story (Murdock appeared in Live Feed back in 2014 or something like that). I got a lot of world building done and found his voice pretty quickly, as he’s a hardboiled information-age troubleshooter, which is kind of what I feel like most days anyway. To call Murdock Collins a Mary Sue is to fully understand the term.
But that story also petered out, the more I got into the worldbuilding the more I realized the story may not work as I want it to, and it may not fit the world at all, or I just don’t know the world as much as I thought I did.
A few days later I did yet another simple prompt from the Story Engine and did a really bad job creating characters and my attitude against everything was showing, so I scrapped that version and tried a completely different route.
Favorite first lines from this month:
Tralaney didn’t know which was worse: being chased by the angry mob calling you a spellspawn and magicblight and other epithets, or when that mob chasing you stops suddenly as you cross some threshold of local legend you didn’t know about.
It’s entirely possible that too much wine became a factor in the foolishness
Okay, I like them now, I probably won’t next year.
Themes
Second Hand Biographies
One of my big long term projects is to tell the biography of a person through a series of connect stories, but that person is never a main character in the individual stories. So I’m trying to write about him and explore his life through the eyes of others. I’ve written two or three complete stories and I have a lot more notes on other stories. I know the course of his life, I know the last story, but I don’t ever try to get into his mind and make him a narrative character. I think I have good reasons for that.
Also, in my hardboiled detective stories, the prompt I generate isn’t about the narrator. The narrator, being a detective, discovers the story during the process.
I am able to make someone active with a problem a narrative character, but that’s when I really start waffling.
Muted Powersets
Another theme that came up this month was muted powers. I had two characters in completely different stories who had some magical faculty but not a great strength of magical power. In one story the big expression of magic is done by manipulating aura’s and one of the characters can only see shades of gray where others can see full colors. Tralaney can barely sense magic and can’t consciously use it. He just accidentally casts spells. I’m sure there’s something in my mind I’m trying to work out with that, because in life and work I feel like I’m thinking under a heavy blanket. My mind is slow and dull and it’s historically flicking through associations quickly and vividly. But for the past year or so my brain has just been idling.
Technique
I know I am one of those writers who has a problem getting characters from here to there. It always seems like there’s one more errand that has to be run, one more trap, one more complication to overcome, and the text begins to wander. This happened with the big story. I found it harder and harder to get the characters in the same place, and then I still wasn’t sure how they were going to get to the end because frankly I lost track of their stories.
An experiment I want to try soon is to write the final scene, the big conflict, and then see if I can backfill the story to make that final scene necessary. My hope is that I’d stop waffling the middles of the stories and get characters moving quickly in the final product. It’s only a thought experiment now, with no real plan. I usually see the starts of stories rather than the ends, so I have to train myself on writing endings first, if that makes any sense.
My NaNoWriMo inventory
- The Science Fiction version of the adventure prompt – drafted
- The Fantasy version of the adventure prompt – abandoned
- Rankin and Turo – mostly drafted, needs an ending and pruning shears
- A flash piece about reality
- Start of a Murdock Collins mystery
- Trelanay’s story
- An abandoned attempt on the same prompt
- An outline for a novella in the fantasy connected world project
- A personal anecdote (I had no idea what to write one morning, so I just wrote this memory of that time I was the middleman in a triple play in little league baseball)
Two finished pieces, and four healthy starts. The rest I hope to never see again. Except the anecdote. I really like that story about myself.
The Tips
On a lark I posted a random tip from a random internet stranger on the NaNoWriMo subreddit. Then the next day I did it again, and I kept them up until the 25th. The last five days I had nothing. I had some good feedback and interactions with them, and I need to go through them in greater detail.
One of my self-delusions is that I am a teacher, and these tips were written under that delusion. I’ll unpack them in greater detail later, as I try to rebuild my thinking life.