November has come to an end. As I have every year since 2012 (except 2013), I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which is a challenge writers take to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. I finished the day before Thanksgiving this year, and have been taking it easy, so this blog is dedicated to my thoughts post-challenge.
NaNoWriMo is Challenging
The challenge is not easy. 50,000 words in one month is a lot of writing when it isn’t your job or part of your school work. Depending on how fast you can write, or how your ideas flow, that’s around an hour and a half to two hours of dedicated writing time per day. Rounding up, the average daily word count is 1,667 words. I usually go way over that per day, just because I prefer to have extra work done because life happens and you can’t always set aside that time every day unless you are writing professionally.
This year, I managed to do the challenge while working a full-time job with overtime and a part-time job. I had to cut a lot of time out of just about everything else in my life to make it work, but it’s something I try to do every year. The struggles of life, chores, taking care of pets, maintaining family relationships, friendships, and hobby activities all vie for your attention, and that’s honestly the biggest part of the challenge: making the time. I don’t know anyone who would just have that kind of time. At least, not at my age.
It’s not like I haven’t learned this lesson before, but I am always impressed by how significant an effort it is, and how long it takes to come out on the other side. This usually means a certain degree of fear leading into the challenge, but the day before NaNo is Halloween, so fear is part of the whole experience, right? *nervous laughter*
The Book I’m Working on is Going to be Massive
I can hardly wrap my head around how big the book has already gotten. This is the fifth NaNo I have done on the same project, meaning the first draft is over 250,000 words long. I have written in this project outside of NaNo as well, so it could be 270,000 words by now. That’s not a massive book on its own, but the story isn’t even half finished yet. The book is going to have a major event in the middle that has repercussions throughout the world and on every character, resetting the stage for the final conflict which will require as much lead-up as the middle conflict.
If you assume that I complete the middle conflict at around 300,000 words, the whole book would be 600,000 words at least. That’s bigger than George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Now, that isn’t to say some heavy cutting down wouldn’t happen. This is all just a first draft anyway. It’s just as likely I could add 150,000 new words in a few rewrites, and take away 200,000 more. I have added entire scenes to books when I was certain they were nearly ready for publication, so the total could even go up from 600k.
“Why not just cut it in half?” Because I don’t want to, that’s why. No, the real reason is the whole story revolves around one single threat, and one major character arc. However, telling the story of this one major character arc and this one single threat involves at least five dominant perspective characters, a timespan of several years (in story time) and chronicling the travels of characters across thousands of miles by land, sea, and air. It’s just going to be a huge book. If you thought Withered Kingdom was short at 60,000 words, just wait until I drop 600,000 words on you.
This work-in-progress would be the fifth book in the series if you count Withered Kingdom as book one. Withered Kingdom‘s sequel (forthcoming as of this writing) is around 120,000 words in its current draft. The third book would be around 60-70,000 words, and the fourth book should be about the same length as the third. That means the fifth book would be longer than all the other books before it combined. So yeah, massive.
Writing Long Scenes Can be Fun
This NaNo I spent more than 10,000 words on one scene alone. By “scene” I mean a single character’s perspective, with one main objective, all taking place linearly. It’s almost like a short story within a story, and probably the longest single scene in the book.
During this month, I have been listening to the audiobook version of “A Game of Thrones” by George R. R. Martin and reading the digital version of “The Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien. If you take LoTR as a single book, these are two very large books, even for the fantasy genre. They have inspired me to write longer scenes and use asterisks or line breaks to denote gaps in storytelling or short passages of time. I used some of these techniques to tell the story of one of the main characters in my book learning to explore elements of his past that he had suppressed. I present this idea in parallel to his physical progress down into a cave and the realizations he has as he goes deeper into his memory to unlock new understanding and power. It’s an artsy kind of thing, and I think it will end up being one of the book’s biggest highlights.
I finished the challenge halfway through a second long scene, which involves one character’s journey from point A to point B. The character starts with nothing, and goes from city to city trying to get somewhere important in time. I’m adapting some conflict-building guidance I got in college writing courses into a character arc and a travelogue at the same time. Will it work? I’m less sure about this one, but one aspect of this scene will certainly surprise my readers and people who know me. I go out into some territory I haven’t tread before as a writer.
Let your Characters Make Mistakes
This is something I’ve always had a lot of trouble with. I almost always try to make my good characters always do good things, but that can be bad for a story. Listening to “A Game of Thrones” does help inspire me as to how my characters could make mistakes or even purposefully make bad decisions and still be interesting characters. Learning to balance a character’s decisions is tough, but I’m doing it because I think it’s where I need to improve the most. Sometimes characters hurt other characters, sometimes they let them down, sometimes they forget to do the right thing, and sometimes doing one right thing means not doing a different right thing. These conflicts help make characters more interesting. Now, whether I’m doing that right or wrong is another issue entirely.
Making a compelling character is not easy. I find it to be one of the most challenging things in writing a book, but I am not going to shy away from trying. I’m not turning my books into something as dark and brutal as the Song of Ice and Fire series, but I am trying to make the tone of this fifth book something of note. The biggest way I’m doing this is by making my characters act out a little more.
Other Thoughts
Aside from being daunted by how much of the story is still left to tell, I have thought a lot about the challenges of wrangling together a bigger story. It’s hard to come back to sub-plots I haven’t written about in a year or two. Going back and hunting for the document where I wrote a previous year’s story can be frustrating and time consuming. Remembering what I wanted a character to do or see, or recalling just where certain objects or people are from year to year can make my head spin. Yet I always find it is worth the effort to make sure and check, it helps save on revision time later. I never had these challenges with smaller books, but the size this one is reaching is making it almost impossible to keep track of everything.
I don’t outline my stories, and I’m more confidant in that way of thinking now than usual. Even though outliners reading this may think that I should just write an outline and it would fix the whole thing, that’s just not how my brain works. I do not stick to outlines. The story flows and changes as I write, and the strength of the story comes out of revision. I need to finish a first draft and then I can create an outline post-draft, but not the other way around. Which brings me to another point…
I’m taking something I’ve seen from a few writers and using it: titling sections of prose with the name of the perspective character. When writing in third-person limited, it can help a lot to simply say who is seeing, hearing, and feeling most things in a scene. While I like making up crazy titles, I think I will stick with using perspective character subtitles when it comes up to publication time. For now, I am helping future me by listing the perspective character, and the location (region>city>building/room). That way, going back through this year’s writing will help me remember who is where and what they are doing a lot easier.
Final Reflections
I love participating in the National Novel Writing Month challenge. No matter how hard it is, being able to say you wrote 50,000 words (even if you only say it to yourself) is a strong reminder that you can dedicate to something, and create a story. Even if that story is less than half-baked, it is still the beginning of something, or maybe the middle of a much larger thing. Writing is my passion, and I wish I had more time to read and write so I could have this kind of experience year-round.
Whether you participated in NaNo or not, I hope you had a good November. The holidays might be your favorite or least favorite time of year, but November can be one of the most enchanting through sustained creative effort. Here’s to next year’s challenge, and all the writing in between!
The Phyronian Chronicle 