(source: acegames)
I'm a NaNoRebel. Always have been, almost
certainly always will be. To me, NaNo is nothing more than a way of making sure
I get down 50,000 words in a single month. That's it. Get the writing down for
the story I'm working on, whichever way I have to.
For those that don't
know, a NaNoRebel is someone, generally, who is working on continuing an
existing work. It's what I did last year, and it's what I was going to do this
year, until real life got in the way and guaranteed I couldn't finish the
50,000 in a month. Buying a house and moving in have a strange tendency to take
up a little time.
So, last year, I was
sitting down to plan my first NaNo, sometime in September, and I'm jotting down
my notes, building out the plot. It was only about a page long, maybe two, of
chapter names and bullet points, and like all plots, I knew I'd wander away
from it at points along the way. No big deal. And then I plotted out the three
books that followed this one (Læccan Waters, the third of six Four Part
Land stories).
Now I was done
plotting, and I wasn't going to sit around for a month and write nothing
because of a silly NaNo rule. Nor
was I going to wander off-track and distract myself into another story. If I
did that, I’d end up writing an entirely different novel all through the course
of NaNo, since the last time I got distracted it turned out to be 100,000 words
long. So, I started writing Læccan
Waters, and kept it up all through October.
It meant I hit
November 1st with 35,000 of story already written. Not a bad total
for a month, given I was getting my Master's full time. The first week of NaNo,
I did 20,000. Then 10,000 the second. And then I burned out horrendously for
the next two weeks, writing sporadically and fitfully to slowly wander towards
the 50,000 words written goal. In the end, it turned out I had to write 2,700
words on the last day of NaNo to make the goal, and hit 86,000 words.
Yes, there's an extra
thousand in there because the NaNo word counter doesn't agree with either Open
Office or MS Word, which is really rather annoying.
So, what were the
lessons I took away from NaNo, and being a NaNoRebel? First, that I can write
fairly quickly. These days, my average hourly output is around 2,200. It's a
great number, but it comes tied down with other baggage. I fall out of the
habit or the mood of writing quickly, and if I ever do something like NaNo,
which involves concerted effort for a number of weeks straight, I burn out on
week two or three. My brain just does not like the idea of writing that much in
a single story. Probably why it took me
six years to finish a single novel.
As for being a rebel?
I highly recommend it. I hit November past the difficult opening part of the
story, in the flow of writing these characters, and knowing where the story is
going. As the first two weeks showed, I was really rocking it, and if I hadn't
burnt out, I'd have ended somewhere north of 70,000 for the month. Not enough
to finish the story, but enough to take a huge chunk out of it.
And because I've hit
a few writing doldrums recently (too much editing to get two novels into the
market), I was really looking forward to the kick in the pants NaNo would give.
And I'd have been a
NaNoRebel on that same damn story.
James Tallett is the author of a series of fantasy
novels set in The Four Part Land.
The first of these, Tarranau, was published by Deepwood Publishing
in Summer 2011. He also created the Splintered
Lands project, a shared world fantasy anthology. Quickly
recruiting five different writers, over the course of several months James
guided the birth of the Splintered Lands, a land full of kingdoms born anew,
struggling to pull themselves out of a magical and natural apocalypse. Aside
from writing, he can be found on ski slopes across the world. If you’re looking
to stalk James on the web, you can try Twitter, Facebook, his other Facebook, and
Goodreads.