NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a writing competition run in the month of November, and you’re supposed to write 50,000 words in 30 days, averaging 1667 a day (and then 1657 for the last day).
I attempted NaNoWriMo back in 2011, and made it only to about 11,500 words.
I did Nano in 2011, and now in 2015, because I wanted to kickstart a writing habit for myself. I’ve got lots of ideas to write about, and lots of good intentions, but I’ve slacked when it comes to actually sitting down and doing the writing.
The “novel” I wrote this year is called Apocalypse Null. I really like the name. It’s a play on Apocalypse Now and nerds. A basic plot line would be: a journalist attempts to infiltrate an online destructive cult. And I “won” today with 50,253 words.
The first time I did Nano in 2011, I had a very basic idea of what I wanted to write about, and that is one of the reasons that I lost steam less than 12,000 words in. I found it was harder to continue writing when I don’t know what is coming next.
For this Nano, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t lose steam in the first week, and was able to continue writing strong for the whole month. There are various methods for planning or outlining your writing, and I used the Snowflake method. I didn’t buy any guides or software, and just followed what I found in this article here.
So first, I wrote a basic plot line:
an unemployed journalist attempts to infiltrate an online destructive cult
Then I expanded this sentence into a paragraph.
Then I expanded each sentence of the paragraph, into its own paragraph.
And basically I did this multiple times, until I ended up with 3 pages, and 1400 words of a plot summary.
I thought I was set. But I barely made it past 20,000 words before I’d gotten through the 3 pages of my plot summary. Oops.
So I ended up expanding the story, and instead of ending my story with the good guy journalist turning in valuable cult information to his local FBI office… I needed my story to keep going quite a bit more. The plot does kind of go off the rails a bit, including flights across the United States, kidnappings, and more craziness.
I did like some of the new ideas that I was forced to come up with. But since my plot summary failed me, I did make up a bunch of crap too.
So some things that I learned, and some things I hope to continue with my future writing:
- Don’t stop writing. Even if it sucks, don’t even slow down! First draft, worst draft.
- Write a more extensive plot summary? My 3 page summary failed me. I don’t know what I’m going to do next time. Maybe I’ll just try a better outline.
- Don’t waste time doing research, or going back and changing things when your ideas change. Just add notes for yourself in brackets [just like this].
- I write best in the morning right after I’ve woken up, had a few minutes to check my email, the news, and got my coffee in front of me. I have to wait a few minutes so that my brain wakes up.
- Same with research, don’t waste time on deciding the perfect name (although I think the main characters’ names should be decided in your summary). You can always go back and change something that you don’t like. But visiting a site for ideas for names is a huge timesuck and you’ll regret it.
- I try not to listen to music with lyrics because that is distracting. Mostly I just stuck with Noisli. I generally just went with the rain and thunderstorm sounds.
I typed my “novel” into Google Drive, so I really didn’t have any distractions. I own a copy of Scrivener, and maybe I’ll try that for my next project. For ideas that I wanted to incorporate into my writing (that didn’t require me to go back and change things), I’d just write it on a piece of paper and keep it next to my keyboard, and refer to it as I go.
Will this year’s Nano novel, Apocalypse Null, ever see the light of day? I don’t think so. I don’t plan on looking at it again for little while. But even when I do get around to it, I think it’s pretty hard to polish a turd.
By the time the next NaNoWriMo comes around in 11 months, I hope to have several completed novels done.
