Larry M. Coleman

Day’s word count: 3500

Total word count: 42,226

Writing location: BTV (Burlington, VT)

Work: 4:30 p.m. – 9:55 p.m.

Exercise: none

Notes

I have a lot of affection for Burlington overnights in November. Not so much for the place because I’m always too busy to see it while trying to write 50k words in a month, but because of what happened there. It was 2020, my first NaNoWriMo, and I had started to get stuck. The novel had begun to run out of steam. I didn’t know where I was going with it. It was 20 days into the month and I was only 28,000 words in, so I was falling behind. In the hotel, in desperation I continued to type—typing more than writing, but by the end of it, I had written a pretty good humor sketch. That gave me more hope for the book than I’d had for days.

The next day, by coincidence, I had a second BTV overnight. (It’s rare to be in the same city two days in a row, but it happens occasionally.) Still out of ideas for where to go, I took a two-line joke I’d heard that day and decided to write it as a full scene, hoping to break the mental logjam. It worked almost a million words better than I would have ever expected, because that was the day Eileen Wright walked onto the stage and took over. I wrote over 3700 words that night and would have written more had I not had to go to bed for work the next day. After that, winning my first NaNoWriMo was never in doubt. I still remember sitting there at the keyboard realizing this is what the book needed, and I can also still see me forcing myself to go to bed, knowing I’d still be thinking about what I was going to write tomorrow.

In 2024, I wrote almost as much at 3500 words. Not so much in a burst of inspiration, but because the mental groundwork for the scene had already been laid and all I had to do was type it in. I write so much faster now than I used to; part of it is that I’ve written so much that I’m a much better writer than I was then, and a larger part of it is probably that I know these characters so well that a lot of the mental energy that used to have to go into wondering, “What would this character do?” doesn’t have to be burnt on that anymore, leaving more brainspace to come up with interesting ways for them to interact, which makes everything flow more easily.

Even though I know them, they still surprise me all the time. For example, today Ilsa (a major supporting character) and Richard came up with a fun, playful but random way to have a date. I didn’t plan it at all; I just knew that Ilsa’s personality likes to drive the action and she’s on a vacation where she wants to have fun, so something would come out of those two. It did, and it was fun to read it as it got written, and by the end of the writing day, I’d clawed back all of the words I had been behind, just like I had in 2020 in a hotel in Burlington. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.