NaNoWriMo Day 15
If you didn’t notice what the graphs of my progress in my post on normal progress had in common, here are the same two graphs with a line marking November 15th:
Ugh, the “Fifteenth Slump.” The ugly Ides of November. Smack in the middle of the “mushy middle” and all progress comes to a halt.
When we broached the subject of our flagging enthusiasm during one of our writing sessions, it became clear that most of us were having the same problem: Starting had been easy. Continuing was hard….
By the middle of Week Two, we were ready to mutiny. Half of the participants dropped out….
—Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!
In a way, NaNoWriMo is like starting a New Year’s Resolution but on November 1st and your only resolution is to write a novel in a month. It’s easy to start with enthusiasm, but hard to keep it even for a month. In fact, January 17th is an unofficial holiday: Ditch New Year’s Resolutions Day.
You can see by the graph on my first two years, I had the same problem as Baty & Friends did. My two-and-a-half characters (two men and a dog) were starting to flounder. The idea of having a wisecracking smart guy and a recovering alcoholic riding through the desert was running out of steam. All their scenes started to sound too much the same, like a tedious comedian whose punchlines are all variations on his first joke.
I sat down at the keyboard on the 15th and just couldn’t go anywhere. I’d been right on track until then. I’d diligently written every day for the two weeks prior, and hit my goal every day. And then, that day, for the first time, I wrote nothing. Streak broken.
That’s okay, though. It’s fine to fall off the horse sometimes, as long as you get back on. Losing one day just nudges up the needed average per day from 1667 to 1725. It’s not a catastrophe.
But then, the next day… nothing. And again the next day. I’d lost not just the thread, but the care for these characters. I was in a “So what?” lock.
I’d lost the will for these characters to live, so I had nothing to lose at this point. I read a joke that morning that went, “What do you call a girl with one leg? Eileen.” I figured that since the book was already crap, a little more tastelessness wouldn’t make it worse—it couldn’t get any worse than it was. So I decided to throw in a walk-on character whose only purpose was to make that one joke. Having them see a woman with a limp and making a joke to themselves seemed too juvenile even for that dung heap, so I wrote it in a way that she gets to tell the joke herself.
And that was when IT happened. She was so sparkling and funny the way she did it that I realized what was missing. Karl had a foil in Richard, since Richard was designed to be that. But the energy only went one way, from Karl to Richard. Poor Richard was an emotion sink. Eileen was the uninvited savior: she redeemed Richard and carried her own energy. My brain went from despair to ebullience and shifted into the birth of Eileen that I wrote about in “Big Stories Come from Little Stories” last week.
That upward trend on the graph after the three bleak days is something I call the “Eileen Bump.” I love that you can actually see her birthday so clearly.
Week Two came and went. And then some strange things started happening.
The aimless, anemic characters we’d invented in the first fourteen days began to perk up and do things. Quirky, unexpected, readable things.
—Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!
So if you’ve reached the halfway point and the wheels seem to be coming off, don’t despair. Don’t give up. Something will come through if you keep turning the rocks over in your head. In my case, it was a horrible joke that turned out to be my best character. (I love them all like children, but there’s always that one in any family.) For you, it could be a new setting. A new occupation. A plot twist. Or just a plot at all.
You’ll get to the 16th and the day after that and the week after that and finally, the 30th, and when you get there, you’ll have your novel if you don’t let a break turn into setting the parking brake.
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