I am almost certain to finish NaNoWriMo this year by hitting 50,000 words in a single text file. It’s not a huge accomplishment, though. I managed to force myself to write every day in November so far with only one day off, which has made catching up difficult but doable. The biggest challenge was not having enough plot, which is a bit frustrating on my part.
I spent most of the early months of 2020 spending my dedicated writing time learning to plot novels, practicing the various methods in the various books I have purchased over the years. I swear I collect books on writing like Leader Dearest collects debts. I plotted out several longer stories that I really think are novella length, because that seems to be the length I end up thinking up. To flesh these out to full size novels feels like it would simply be padding for the sake of words, which is fine for NaNoWriMo but hardly readable fiction. Even the story I worked on I thought about overwriting and keeping the gems. But I didn’t have a great outline.
My outline was basically seven scenes that could take up a lot of space. I didn’t have a focused outline. I didn’t have a deep understanding of the story. Again, this is my fault. I had several pieces I could have chosen and managed to land on the one that needed the most pantsing, and boy did I pants. I pantsed up new scenes, but ultimately scenes that would be cut because they weren’t really the story.
The real story is a lesson: Anger is bad fuel. Unfortunately I didn’t treat this as a proper thematic sentence. I would normally write up arguments for and against the thematic sentence, which I use as a proposition in a long argument in the plotting. I didn’t do the work.
I also had a problem I didn’t expect to have with this story. I had a hard time keying in to the main character’s anger. I had plenty of good reasons for him to be angry, but I didn’t write with that anger, because I couldn’t feel it. I guess maybe I’m more of a method writer than I think I am or want to be.
I chose poorly, but that’s okay. NaNoWriMo has never been about getting a finished work, but getting a habit again. Because one thing I suck at is habit. Every day is day one. None of that ‘do something for 30 days and it’s a habit’ crap. It doesn’t work for me. Aside from drinking coffee, there isn’t anything I choose to do every day. I suck at quotidia.
The other problem I had, and always have, is limiting myself to one character’s point of view. Not actual point of view problems, but to turn off my own problem solving skills and think as the characters do. This narrator went off trying to understand all the reasons why someone else may have acted as they did, instead of reacting as only they could have, they reacted as the writer tried to figure things out. Again, I’m not as good of a method writer as I think I am or need to be.
Yes, I’m aware I’ve committed a contradiction. I’ve recently read a lot of Star Wars new continuity books, including the Canto Bight collection and Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy. I experienced moments of knowing just how stupid some decisions were that the characters were making. I can’t seem to do that in my fiction. I can’t narrow my focus and thoughts to make a mistake believable. Despite the millions of mistakes I make almost every damn day, especially when I’m trying to solve a Sudoku.
So my next challenge will be to develop the characters more, to develop enough of a personality that their reactions will be honest and not obviously “the writer needed him to do something stupid here”.
But I look forward to reading a previous outline that I built up, rework it, and start a new story.