NaNo for the New and the Insane by Lazette Gifford

(source: bagse_boise)

November 1 is inching ever closer.  Plot Bunnies are lining up, preparing for the biggest first day rush of their busy little lives.  Muses are getting pep talks and inner editors are already starting to sulk. 

Meanwhile, people are hunting down lost outline notes and frantically stocking up on snacks they probably shouldn't consider eating, let alone as their only fare for most of a month.  Sales of anything with caffeine are already doubling as people start to hoard the precious stuff. 

And many of us are going mad trying to get our outlines done in time.

I love NaNoWriMo.  

Anyone who has spent time with me knows how much I enjoy the NaNo experience.  I start talking about the next NaNo sometime in January.  By October, it's become an obsession and even my cats are starting to worry about November and if I'll remember to feed them while in my writing frenzy.  I first joined in 2001, and I have won, sometimes rather over-zealously, each year since.  Unless things go very wrong, I should top two million words total (all years added up) with this year's NaNo. 

I'm going to tell you something you might not realize. This is going to sound odd from someone who has written so much in November:  It isn't the word count that is important in NaNo. Sure, you want to try to get 50k, but even that isn't as important as two things you should consider.

First, have fun.

Second, learn something about yourself as a writer.

The first happens when you stop letting NaNo cause you stress. It's not important enough to worry so much over.  NaNoWriMo will not make or break you as a writer, let alone as a person.  NaNo is an experiment and an intellectual marathon.  Not everyone is a marathon runner, even if they jog every day.

The second point is tied into that last bit.  You might be a jogger, not a sprinter.  You might only jog on weekends.  There's nothing wrong with deciding NaNo doesn't work for you.  On the other hand, you might learn that writing a fast first draft is exactly what you need to do.  If you don't experiment and let yourself go, how will you ever know?

A few years ago, I put together NaNo for the New and the Insane, a free little ebook for those joining in the fun, or thinking about doing so.  I put it together because I had written a number of posts and articles related to NaNo and I realized it would be far easier to put everything into one NaNo-related book rather than drag up a half dozen links each time I talked to someone.  So I set about outlining what I thought would be needed to flesh it out and make it really helpful.

The book starts with an Introduction to the Insanity and then goes on to other things: Preparing for Nano; Forums, Blogs, Websites and More: Goals and Keeping Them; Keep Writing to The End; The After Nano Blues; and finally Just For Fun (including Author Versus Character -- the Woodle Pooves story that I wrote for the NaNo boards many years ago.)

The book is filled with little tidbits of stuff that might help some of you.  It's not long.  Give it a try.  It's my NaNo gift to all the other people joining into this exciting, fun marathon.

Right now, we're barely two weeks away from the magical starting line.  As usual, I plan to be up at midnight and begin writing at 12:01 am.  My first few days will be insane with rather large word counts.  This is fun to me.  On three different years I've topped 20k on the first day.  The pure joy of flying through a story -- living it that intensely for a few hours -- is something I wish I could do more often.  However, like most of us, I do have to come back to the real world and get other things done.  Like feed cats.

By the end of November I will likely have two or three new first draft novels.

And I'll be thinking about next year.

Lazette Gifford owns Forward Motion for Writers and publishes the ezine Vision: A Resource for Writers.  She also owns A Conspiracy of Authors, a publishing and marketing co-op which includes several other indie authors.  Her traditionally published works includes Honor Bound, Star Bound and Farstep Station from Yard Dog Press; Between a Rock and a God's Place (Issue #21 of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine); and the eight volume Dark Staff series from Double Dragon Publishing. Her Indie books include Ada Nish Pura, Kat Among the Pigeons, and Summer Storm. You can also find her at her site, the Joyously Prolific Blog, and twitter. 

The Makings of a NaNoRebel by James Tallett

(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 1^st 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.