Larry M. Coleman

NaNoWriMo Day 2

I do not exist. I can even say that twice: for two years, I don’t exist. At least, according to NaNoWriMo’s servers.

Y2K was the first year I tried to write a novel in a month. NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, was much smaller then; fresh and new, as was the internet to most of the public. We still used dial-up at home and the web was still the web, not Web 2.0 or whatever version we’re up to this week.

Hearing of this new experiment, I created an account and tried writing a novel. I’d written quite a bit before then, mostly short stories, aphorisms, and some poems, but never anything approaching even a novella, much less something 50,000 words long.

I hacked away and hit the 5,000-word mark. I remember being happy that I’d reached the 10% mark, but sad that it happened with the month already 33% done. I managed another 500 words before abandoning the effort. Probably for the best, because although the document was on a hard drive that’s long gone, it was so bad I still remember how bad it was. It’s probably what killed the hard drive.

Oh well, there’s always next year. So I tried again the following year. I bailed out at 3,000 or so words. I don’t remember the exact count, but it was about half of what I’d pounded out the year before. I can’t look up the number because it was so long ago even NaNoWriMo doesn’t have the records.

So, in 2019, I decided I was going to try again. No real idea why I picked that year, but 2019 I was going to try again. Which I would have, had I remembered. It was the middle of November before I remembered it was November and I was supposed to have started writing a novel about two or three weeks ago. Oh well, there’s always next year.

This gave me almost an entire year to stew up ideas. In October 2020, I did something I hadn’t done the first two (mercifully invisible) times before: I spent the month preparing. I came up with possible story ideas. Created two characters I liked and tossed in a dog for good measure. Took some short courses in novel writing. Reread Stephen King’s On Writing, one of the only books I’ve ever read three times. Read No Plot, No Problem for the first time. (I reread it while preparing for this month’s series and nodded quite a bit now that I’ve gone from getting ready for my first NaNoWriMo to having done four successful ones.)

By the time the month was over, I had pages of notes, concepts, and ideas. I had no idea which one I’d end up going with. The one I went with wasn’t even on the list, and the one that was at the top of the list may never end up getting written—that’s one of the most fun parts about writing a novel in general, and especially one in a month. You never know what you’re going to end up with.

The scraps were useful. The classes, not so much. Writing is like a sport: you don’t learn to play basketball or football or soccer by taking classes, you learn and get better by being out there playing it.

Here is the single most important thing I did differently the first time I won, and all the times since: instead of trying to make everything perfect as I wrote, I just tried to make it written.

Instead of trying to make everything perfect as I wrote, I just tried to make it written.

The first two times, I wrote the way most people do: each sentence had to be the best I could do at that time. Each paragraph had to go exactly into the story. If it didn’t, the problem was obviously with the words, not the story, right?

Wrong. The story knows what it wants better than you do. Accept that. If you don’t, you’ll give up at 5,000 or 3,000 words or at some point. Even with the notes and ideas I came up with ahead of time, I never would have finished 50,000 words if I didn’t let myself not try to write every single word (or page, or chapter) directly to the Nobel Prize committee.

This meant a lot of surprises along the way. The original Chapter 1 ended up being Chapter 30 in the finished book. An entire chapter, Chapter 7, ended up being deleted before November was over. As it was getting near to the end, that chapter, which dealt with the history of the second protagonist, no longer suited the character at all. Sure, that was a loss of words, but as the book found itself, that character ended up turning out much better than I could have originally imagined and that part of his history is something he’d outgrown so much it had to go. If I’d tried to keep him tied down to that history—like I would have in my previous attempts—he wouldn’t have ended up being in four more books, with this November’s book being all about him.

Even chapter numbers themselves ended up getting tossed along the way. As the book developed in ways I hadn’t expected, I started losing track of what happened in what chapter when they were just numbers. I started giving them titles instead. I left one of the numbers in as an inside joke; it’s called “Chapter 47ish” because the numbers shifted around so much.

And then the biggest surprise: a character walked on and took over. One I hadn’t imagined or planned or had any idea would appear, but she became the star in the subsequent books. By that point, I was halfway through the book and getting the hang of letting it barely hang together.

The downside of giving yourself the freedom to be creatively brilliant is that you’re giving yourself the freedom to write a lot of crap, too. The end product of my first NaNoWriMo success had some things in it that were good, but it was rolled inside a lot of bad stuff, too. Jokes that weren’t funny anymore (and weren’t all that great the first time around). Subplots that had become unnecessary. Even a major subplot, one taking up one full chapter and the equivalent of a couple more scattered in pieces throughout the book, ended up being removed in the long editing process afterward. (For the better, probably, because that subplot is going to become a book of its own.)

That’s part of the process. No one has to see your rough draft but you. Even so, you’ll get better at it the more you let yourself do it. I’ve done it so much that my rough draft has a style of its own. My wife is the only one who gets to read my work as it’s written, and she’s gotten to where she can recognize when I’m just writing down the plot and will make it acceptable when revision time comes—and November is never revision time. Get it down and clean it up later. You’re not painting a room; you can slop things around without having to figure out how to get it out of the carpet.

You’re not painting a room; you can slop things around without having to figure out how to get it out of the carpet.

That one single thing is what’s let me complete four straight NaNoWriMos. And although it sounds like I’m advocating writing sloppy, crappy things just for the sake of writing, you’ll find out that in the end, after the passes of revision, it allows you to write better than you would have if you’d tried to get it “perfect” the first time. You’ll think things you wouldn’t have other wise, create things you wouldn’t have otherwise, and meet characters you would have passed by without a nod.

The final result of November will be a book no one would buy, but the 5,000 words I wrote the first time was a story even I didn’t like reading. Now I’ve had 5,000-word days. (Not many, as I tend to be creatively drained somewhere around the 2,500-3,000 word point.) Making it a book someone would buy is what December and the rest of the year is for.

Writing is one of the most fun things you can do if you actually give yourself the freedom to have fun with it. Take November and let yourself do that. Leave the hard parts (writing is easy; writing well is hard) for once you’ve knocked out your 50k. Learning to do that is what got me to finally break through to my first NaNoWriMo success and follow it up with three more, and it’s what will get you there, too. Good luck and have fun!