NaNoWriMo 2015 After Action Report & Lessons Learned

Every year except for last year (which we will neither mention nor think about) it seems my writing process for NaNoWriMo improves by some measure and 2015 is no exception. This year, due to changes at work and time demands from taking martial arts, I’ve probably had nearly half the time to write than in years past and yet I have, for the most part, kept up with my writing quotas. Following are some tips, tricks & techniques I found useful.

Disclaimer: Everyone approaches NaNoWriMo differently and I’m sure a number of people will consider some of these techniques “cheating.” It largely depends on what you think the “rules” of NaNoWriMo are. My opinion is that the purpose of NaNoWriMo is to get writers into the habit of writing regularly and to help them gain the confidence and skills necessary to continue do so. It is not necessary that you write a new book, that you complete a new book, that you write only one book or that (despite it’s name) that it even be a novel or work of fiction. The one absolutely rule for me is that you start on November 1st and that you write fifty-thousand words by November 30th. So here are some of the techniques that have been particularly helpful for me this year.

1. Have a plan — I knew back in 2007, when I first started NaNoWriMo, that I had to have as much pre-planning completed as I could before it started so I would spend as little time as possible stopping to think about what comes next. Since my scenes generally run around 1K each, that means I need to start the month with at least a list of 50 scenes. Of course I didn’t quite do that this year. So — not for the first time — things got a little sketchy toward the end, requiring that I fall back on some other techniques.

2. Write what interests you right now — The important this is getting words on the page. Whatever motivates you to do that, pursue it. So...

2.a. It’s OK to skip around — I admit I actually like to go through my scenes fairly sequentially because — though I do like to plan things out — I always discover things in writing that I will build on in later scenes. There is certainly no reason you couldn’t later go back and change scenes after  discovering the foreshadowing you wanted to include or just generally set up for reveals that hadn’t been planned ahead of time, that’s what editing is for, just try to not get caught up in going back and revising until after NaNoWriMo is over. The important thing is to keep moving forward.

2.b. It’s OK to write more than one story / thing — There are certainly more than a few writers (mostly pantsers I expect) who start out writing one story, then change their mind in mid-nano because either a side character or a sub-plot became more interesting. The idea that this is OK was something of a revelation to me. In the past I normally just gutted through one story, but lately I’ve also had some random stories that have come bursting out of me at high word counts. Sometimes I think it helps to have a major change in tone or plot to freshen things up during NaNoWriMo rather than trudging through the same story for the entire month — but then I’m severely ADD so that could also be a problem when my goal is to have a complete novel at the end. At least that time normally wasted sitting around trying to decide what will happen next and how it will happen, is now used productively.

3. Capture every moment — Some people can crank out 100K novels in November that are actually decently written. I hate and envy those people. OK, I don’t hate them, but I definitely envy and maybe feel just a twinge of disgust. :)Though every year I refine and improve my process, I usually just barely do 50K in November.

NaNoWriMo is all about focus. To succeed, I have to snatch every spare moment of time and use it to produce story. Even when I’m not writing, I’m mentally reviewing what I’ve written and planning what to write next. I think that level of focus helps bring out aspects of the story that would never be discovered if I were to take a more leisurely pace and split my attention with daily concerns. To help cature this, I usually carry a little fat notebook with me wherever I go. Everything in my head, setting, dialog, history, narrative, it all goes in the notebook.

4. Forget the keyboard, try the pen  —  When I am sitting at the keyboard taking an hour or more to write a mere dozen or so words I can sometimes crank out hundreds of words a minute simply by ditching the keyboard for the pen. Perhaps it’s just that I’m left-handed and so stimulate the more creative right side of the brain when I write by hand, or perhaps  the act of physically coordinating my hand when writing slows my ADD brain down enough to focus my thoughts, but I find this change in technique particularly effective when other approaches fail. I’ve written as much as a third of my nanos by hand this way.

5. If you’re not ready to write the scene, then write about the scene — I’ve a bad habit of rehearsing scenes in my head to get them right. For example, in dialog, I may know that I have three or four subjects that need to be addressed during the scene, but I want the conversation to flow freely and naturally from one topic to another so that if a character starts with subject ‘A’, the next character will naturally respond with ‘B’, and another ‘C’. But sometimes these subjects may not be naturally related. You may need to have characters go from ‘A’ to ‘B’ then back to ‘A’ or even ‘D’ before going on to ‘C’. Planning all this out, along with the right emotional notes, the shift in character relationships as well as the overall plot can be difficult, yet I can’t afford to spend a lot of time rehearsing.

Sometimes when I’m not sure how to write a scene, I just write about the scene. I write about what I want to happen or options I’m considering. Often I’ll start writing the scene this way and immediately after describing it, have worked out what I want to do during that process. Part of my editing process is doing a “show don’t tell” check to see if I’ve mentioned an emotion without illustrating it, or summarized a conflict that should have been played out step by step. Since writing about the scene is all about telling, it often provokes me into going back and writing the scene I was talking about.

5.b. This technique is also useful if you are writing a character's reaction to a prior scene ( where they were not the POV character) but you're not sure precisely what that reaction should be. Try re-writing the prior scene from their POV. The details of setting and action are not what are important here. Feel free to summarize those, only focus on the new POV's responses to them. If that doesn't work, play reporter and question them about it, writing down their answers.

6. Capture every thought  —  I learned the lesson of Technique #3 by accident while seeking help in the NaNoWriMo and other writer forums for difficult scenes which I was trying to decide how best to handle. Often, just by describing the problem and adequately defining it, the answer would come to me. I don’t have the time I used to have to hang out in forums during November, but I can accomplish the same thing with Technique #3. In fact anything I write about my NaNoWriMo project or even writing in general can prove helpful, so as a result, whether it’s a forum post or a blog post like this one. I write it in my NaNoWriMo doc file first (I create a new one on Nov. 1) then copy and paste it into wherever I want to share it. At least it gives me the chance to spell check it first.

7. Write just write!  — What do you do when it’s 11:15 PM, you’ve only written a couple hundred words and didn’t even make it to one thousand the day before? The answer is write, write anything no matter what. The best way to jam out a massive word count is to not even think about the writing. Authors call this free writing and it is actually a good way to free up the mental blocks and get the word flowing. Just scroll to the bottom of your document and write about whatever is on your mind, whatever you’re feeling, whatever frustrations you’re having with your story or anything else that is distracting you. Not only will it help you get your word count back on track and reduce the urge to just quit because you've fallen so far behind, it can also (as in Technique #3) help you figure out what you need to do to get your story going again.

8. Delete nothing — This has been a basic rule of mine since year 1(of my participation in NaNoWriMo.) Forget that the keyboard even has a delete key. One of the biggest tricks of NaNoWriMo is turning off the internal editor. Sometimes though, it’s hard to ignore the obvious. When I find something that obviously needs to be changed I just put brackets around [it.] ←- the part that needs to be deleted and write that part the way it should be. Sometimes, though, a new paragraph will take two or three runs at it before I get the phrasing right. This can make it hard to figure out what’s extraneous, what’s being kept and thus where I should go next. This, unfortunately, may lead to me dragging these mistakes out to the end of the paragraph/page/scene/document, which is not a bad thing in itself except that it sucks up some of the time that was saved by not going back and editing and deleting some of the word count. And did I mention I had ADD? It’s surprising how distracting something like that can be.

[and] [to earlier] [NaNoWriMo] [that I’m not] [conversation] about [I need] [book] [work through] [in]  [so that I know] [read] [it is particularly difficult I find it’s just because] [by hand] and in [was]
[this year] some [can’t] [adding] was can [when all things are said and done] [Focus on ] [what I’m thinking about making happen] [sometimes]

In Conclusion...

I hope you find some of these techniques helpful. If you don't like/disagree with any, don't feel you have to use any if then. If you have some additional techniques or variations you like to use, please share. Most importantly, whether it's November or not, always keep writing.

Do You Really Know What Your Story is About?

This last year has been a gut-wrenchingly horrible disaster.  The only way I survived it was by getting lost in a new story that is so personal, I can't really talk about it right now.  I've done a number of things to take charge of my life, and in the writing arena, I finally decided to sign up for Holly Lisle's writing course How To Think Sideways, which encapsulates pretty much everything she learned from when she decided she wanted to be a writer, until she first got published and won all these awards.

In the first month, she presented a lot of clever ideas for tapping into your own subconscious and determining what stories are truly important to you.  I can't tell you what they are because, not only are they copy-written, I've paid a lot of money to learn them, so don't ask.

One technique I do want to talk about is something that is not unique to her.  In fact I came up with my own version of it years ago, and though her approach does offer an interesting angle I need to figure out how to incorporate into my process, over all I prefer my own approach.

That technique is the story sentence.

We used to play a game on the NaNoWriMo forums called 20-word synopsis, which really caused me to develop a system for writing synopses.  I call it my four questions and I don’t even start writing a story until I can answer them and produce a one sentence synopsis.

Who is the story about?

Not so much their name, but what is their role in the story? An orphaned street urchin?  A bored housewife?  An Evil necromancer who loves candy?  Start with a basic noun and adjective.

What do they want?

This is going to be the thing that moves the story forward.  This is what they are going to struggle and sacrifice for.

What is stopping them from achieving it?

Either the villain or natural forces or whatever the Protagonist is struggling against.  Often there is both an external conflict: overthrow the evil empire, and an internal conflict: must address a childhood trauma and overcome a debilitating fear of snakes to defeat the evil snake god.  If one is more important than the other, focus on that.  It’s up to you to decide if that secondary conflict should be added into your synopsis as an additional complication.

What is at stake?

This is the bad thing that will happen if the Protagonist fails.  This is why we should care about the story, what makes it interesting.

If you want to try and play the 20-word synopsis, try answering each question in five words or less.  For a book synopsis you’ve got a little more room, but this should help you focus on the important and interesting parts.

There is also an unofficial fifth question I like to answer before I start writing, though it never goes into the synopsis. 

How does the character change over the course of the story? 

There are a few cases where you actually don’t want the character to change, but most of the time they will.

Is My Head On Backwards?

In an attempt to stay relevant beyond November, the folks over at NaNoWriMo have started offering much-needed help and advice to authors in the post first-draft phase of writing.  I'm not there yet, but I started reading some of my much-neglected writer blogs to try and fire myself up for writing the second half my this year's novel.  I just read a recent blog post of theirs “A 7-Step Guide to Big Picture Revision” and once more I am struck by how completely opposite my writing process is from most everyone else’s.

My official scientific survey of other people’s writing styles (conducted by the method of reading and noticing things) seems to indicate that the great majority of writers—including a large number of published writers—start with some sort of idea about a character or a situation that sounds interesting, followed by a lot of writing, then a period of investigation to determine what was actually written (followed by large portions being thrown out and other large portions being re-written.)

This just seems to be incredibly wasteful to me, like first throwing a bunch of randomly colored paint at a canvas, then deciding what kind of painting you can make out of it.  OK, on second thought, that does sound like a fun creative exercise.  But is that a professional way to do things?

In reading the author’s suggestions for revision, I realized I probably did about half those steps before I even started writing.  Doing it any other way just seems backwards.  I’ll admit that when I first started writing, at least before I started trying to seriously write novels, I did a lot of writing like that, but I don’t know if any of those explorations and exercises ever amounted to anything.

The reason all this surprises me is that early in my self-study of the craft of writing, I came across James Frey’s “How to Write a Damn Good Novel” I & II and his concepts of “step sheets”—mapping out the character’s journey from the initial conflict to the final conclusion.  It just made so much sense to me--(being an INTJ on the Meyers Briggs charts of course I’m drawn to a more systematic approach)--that I assumed that all professional writers did something like that.  Instead I’m constantly finding myself very much in the minority.

So now I’m wondering what other writers’ approaches are.  Is it primarily “write first and structure later” or are there some other modified/hybrid/Off-the-wall approaches used out there?

Post NaNoWriMo Ennui

I’ve never run a marathon (I’ve never run anything longer than a couple of 5Ks) but I hear it’s pretty exhausting.  I often compare NaNoWriMo to a mental marathon though, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at how exhausted I am having finished it.  

Each year as I get excited preparing for NaNoWriMo, I always wonder why I didn’t get more writing done after November.  2013 was actually a pretty productive year for me writing-wise.  Even so I still wondered why half my novels have taken two years when, if I wrote more consistently, I could easily get them done in one.

Now I’m starting to remember.  It’s the week after nano and I’ve only poked at my story.  (Rather like a pre-adolescent boy poking at a dead body with a stick.)  All that energy and movment is completely gone.  This year I didn’t even finish off all my pre-planned bullet points.  I still have a few more scenes that I know need to happen, but I can’t seem to figure out how to care about them enough to write them.

I did go back and re-read what I’ve done so far.  The section where my young lady assassins appear still amuses and interests me greatly.  I’m already kicking around an idea for a sequel to frame their backstory.  In fact I’ve been toying with the idea of doing something really, really, really stupid.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a comic.

Drawing and writing comics were my first love as a child.  However, I have drawn almost nothing of significance in the last three decades.  I did, however, get a rather inexpensive Wacom drawing tablet late last year, and my drawing hand has been getting itchy as I’ve browsed through some instructional videos on youtube.

I’m probably just going to start with some character sketches with the idea of using them for the cover of my next book.  Then we’ll see where it goes.

That’s assuming I somehow get this book done.

Passing the 2/3rds mark

I can’t believe this month is almost over.  It seems like November just began and already NaNoWriMo is 2/3rds over.  I've had ideas for a couple of posts, mostly about the process of writing, but I've been so busy writing I haven’t had time to write about the writing.  What little I've done of that, I've tended to do either on the Nano forums or on the local nano group’s facebook age.  I think next year—assuming I’m still able to do this--I’ll have to make copies and post them on the blog just to make sure content occasionally gets updated.

Every year seems to go a little better than the last and I think, in some ways this year has gone smoother as well.  I was perhaps not quite as prepared as in previous years, but I haven’t really panicked.  I've always kept my running average above where it needs to be though I've missed a couple of days, and even then I got at least half my required quota in. 

In the last couple of years, I haven’t really attended any events.  This year I managed to make a couple, though most of the events are all on the other side of town.  I have enjoyed kibitzing with the facebook group, though and have felt more a part of things.

I've learned a couple of things this year:

1.            Weekends aren't really the lifesaver you think they are.  I even took Friday Nov 1 off and though I made decent progress on Friday, my overall weekend total wasn't any better than my weekly total.  I’m guessing it’s either because there are more distractions or because I’m getting burned out.  I have been spending way too many nights plugging away till midnight so I can bump up my word count. (Which makes those early morning schedules quite painful.)
2.              I’m writing a lot more of my story by hand.  Who would have thought it?  I've been a computer geek since I was a teenager.  Even so, I find that writing in my little fat notebook helps me slow down my thoughts and focus them, make steady progress and gives me a since of accomplishment as I fill up it’s little 3x5 pages.

I’m sure I’ll have more insights later, probably after this is over.  Thanksgiving looms ahead and we have a long car trip waiting for us next week.  It would be nice to finish before Thanksgiving day, but I’m sure I’ll be very busy until then.

Must the Main Character Always Change?

In preparing for this year's NaNoWriMo I've been reading a lot of writing advice hoping for inspiration.  One piece of advice that frequently gets cited is that when planning your story, the writer needs to decide how the main character is going to change.  It's pretty much assumed by many that without some sort of change, you don't even have a story.  But is this true?  Must the main character change?

James Bond has been cited as a character who never changes.  The man at the beginning of the story is pretty much the same person as the man at the end of the story.  While that's true, it might be argued that that James Bond stories are really about the villains.  At least they always seem to learn the lesson at the end that evil doesn't pay.

I can think of a better example, one you probably haven't heard of.  It not only demonstrates how an unchanging character can work, but be just as emotionally satisfying--if not more--than a story where a character changes.  It also explains what others really mean when they offer that other bit of advice: "Find the worse thing that can happen and make it happen."

Trigun is an old western style anime set in the future on a colonized world.

I know what you're thinking: "You want to talk about the craft of writing and you bring up a silly kids cartoon?" It may at times be silly, but its certainly not just for kids. Bear with me.

The main character, Vash, first appears as a bumbling goof-ball caught in a case of mistaken identity during a manhunt for an extremely dangerous criminal. He gets caught in situations with lots of gun play and somehow manages, seemingly through sheer luck, to not only survive but keep anyone else from getting killed.


[spoilers]

It turns out he's not only a real gunman, but the best there ever was...and something of a pacifist. His goofy act is simply an attempt to disarm people-so to speak. Over the course of the series you find out just how committed he is to not letting anyone die as increasingly powerful bounty hunters come after Vash, yet he continues to save the innocents caught in the crossfire at increasingly higher personal costs.  

[even bigger spoilers]

The whole series is really a philosophical discussion been Vash and his brother Knives (Don't you just love his name?) as to whether violence and death are an inherent part of the universe.  (See what I mean about this not really being a kid show?) 


[end of spoilers and back to the main point]

Vash does have a momentary fall from grace where he is put in an impossible situation and appears to compromise his beliefs. But though it nearly destroys him (and me, just watching it) Vash reaffirms his beliefs in the final confrontation with his brother, remaining true to himself. It is his lack of change that makes the end so triumphant. 

If anyone changes in this story (aside from the character of Nicholas D. Wolfwood) it is the viewer, whose understanding of Vash changes as he/she gets an increasingly deeper understanding of who Vash really is. 

So why does this story work without change? 

It goes to that other bit of poorly worded advice, "think of the worst thing that can happen to your character and make it happen." The worst thing that could generally happen to a person is to be killed or rendered helpless and tortured, neither of which would make a good story. What the advice should be is "find out what your character believes in or stands for and test their commitment to that belief. Find out just how much they're willing to suffer or sacrifice to hold on to it." 

Most characters will be flawed and as a result will change. But in those rare cases where a character represents an ideal, you may not want that character to change, but you'll still want to see how much he/she will suffer to hold to that ideal. I'n the case of Vash the Stampede, Vash the Humanoid Typhoon, it turns out he will suffer quite a lot.

Twilight of the Outer Gods

I think I've settled on military SF this year and decided to give fantasy a break.  Of the two main ideas I've been toying with, Twilight of the Outer Gods--military SF in a Lovecraftian universe--is the one providing me with the greatest number of ideas.

These are the characters I've been working with.