For November, This Beautiful Sentence will be slightly different. Instead of focusing on other authors’ words I’ve found beautiful, for NaNoWriMo month I’ll be pulling out four of my favorite passages I’ve written during previous NaNoWriMos. When you’re rushing to write 50,000 words in a month, a lot of that material isn’t great, but every once in a while something bright shines through the pile of rubble.
Richard was lying in a lounge chair he had dragged out in front of the door of his motel room. He needed to stare up at something more interesting than the old water stain on the ceiling from a roof that had been slowly leaking for what looked to have been several years, the same faded paintings on the wall that he hadn’t looked at, the same… sameness.
His tablet lay on his stomach, untouched since he had set it there almost an hour earlier. His phone sat on the side table next to him alongside a bottle of beer and a snack he had bought for himself at the gas station a couple blocks up a quiet, lonely Route 66 from him. Orion lay next to him, happy to lie outside in the fresh evening air as he kept a watchful eye out for tumbleweed.
Richard stared at the illumination around the sign in front of the check-in desk and wished he had been sitting next to a pool instead. He hadn’t missed pools until Karl pointed out their absence. Until then, he was happy to have not been faced with them, relieved that he didn’t have yet another reminder of where he had first seen Eileen. And now, somehow, the absence of them deposited the absence of her directly into his bare chest.
—Larry Coleman, NaNoWriMo 2020
This is one of the first passages in this book that I thought was good enough to stand out. When you’re mashing away at the keyboard trying to hit the 50k goal, it is critical to remember this: these kinds of words don’t have to come out in November.
This is the beginning of “Chapter 47ish,” which is an inside joke that only I’ll get because up until this revision, I still used plain old chapter numbers in this book. As the book expanded, contracted, and blocks got shifted around, chapter numbers became unwieldy. Chapter 47ish actually started as Chapter 30, then got changed so many times that it’s actually Chapter 51 in the final product. If something was deleted (and, yes, sometimes even entire chapters from a NaNoWriMo manuscript are junk enough to not make it through the revision process), sometimes there would be a gap in numbers. Other times, chapters would have letters after their number (I had a Chapter 33 and 33A and even a Chapter 37, 37A and 37B). It wasn’t until this revision, Rev. 8, that I started using chapter titles.
Yes, you read that right: this is from Revision 8. That means it’s the ninth version of the book, because the first draft doesn’t get a number. I don’t have a formal process for bumping up revision numbers; I do it when major adds or deletes change the feel or message of the book.
Rev. 8 is dated May 7, 2022. That means it took a full year and a half to get the book into starting to be presentable, and there were several more afterward. But, again, keep this in mind: none of these revisions started before December. In November, write. In December, revise. In that order.
I couldn’t have come up with this passage the first time around because the book was still trying to figure out what it was trying to say. It took eight more tries for me to write down what it was whispering. In fact, this passage is the beginning of a section that didn’t even exist until this revision, but it’s a section that’s critical to the book. Up until this section, Karl (the man who hired Richard to accompany him on the treasure hunt) has always seemed like a happy-go-lucky eccentric. In this section, Karl pushes himself so hard he collapses and almost dies. The book was a pretty meh, straightforward picaresque novel until this revision. Before then, I had some thoughts that someday this book might be published. Starting with this revision, I had no doubts this thing would find its home someday.
I didn’t get that right in November 2020. It wasn’t until May 2022 until I started to. You won’t get your NaNoWriMo book perfect—or maybe not even good—in November. But you’ll get it done, which is the first step to getting it good.
Next week: Another of my own favorite passages from one of my NaNoWriMo projects over the years.
This Beautiful Sentence will be going back to normal on Wednesday, December 4th. The quotation will be by a mystery author. Not an author of mysteries, but an author who is famous throughout the world who you’ll have to guess about!
See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.
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