So the NaNoWriMo question from Rita the other day set it off. And then today NaNo started emailing and posting out that you can “announce your novel” now. At the beginning of September. Because like Christmas and Pumpkin Spice, we need to move everything to larger and larger windows of when they begin and when they end. Saying right now is a good time to start planning your NaNo, getting some bones of an outline down, sure. Announcing it though? This year? I mean, do we even know if there’s going to be things like The Internet or The Written Word by the time November hits?
You know what else happens in November this year, right?
(Stop giving me a “thumbs down,” Skwerl! Eating a bite of cheesecake between paragraphs isn’t me being distracted. It’s me experiencing joy. Sugar keep the brain worky.)
Now, I am adamant that I am not and should not be doing NaNo this year. Not because of 2020 Chaos Fatigue, but simply because what little lumpiness remains to my grey matter right now needs to be focused on One Thing And One Thing Only. I’m already distracted enough by life’s little anxieties, my cats, and apparently cheesecake. And the sneezing fit that’s just overcome me (Skwerl, if I see that thumb for this, I swear to God).
But in the spirit of trying to let myself “dream bigger” and exploring ideas and stories and just because sometimes the idea of writing something with a set goal when everyone else is doing it can be fun…
I’m thinking about NaNo. Not so much about -doing- NaNo. Just about it.
I can’t remember the first NaNo I tried, as far as when. I know we were living in Petaluma, CA in a house we’d rented with Erin’s mom. It was a big place, very nice, and had a huge open loft area upstairs (the same floor the bedrooms were on). I had a computer desk, an L-shaped one (that survived several moves up until this last one and promptly fell apart as soon as I tried to set it up for my writing desk), and Erin had one as well (but hers was glass as mine was wood/particle board). The were butted up to one another and it made for a pretty comfortable space. I could play on City of Heroes and LiveJournal/MySpace (it was probably a thing at this point) next to her playing her Sims. Sometimes her mom, Becky, would use one of the computers when it was free. I didn’t mind not having a private office. No one bugged me if I was doing anything productive, which I almost never was.
I saw someone post something about NaNoWriMo, again, I’m assuming on LiveJournal. And I looked it up to find out what it entailed. I thought it was interesting and I ordered a copy of “No Plot, No Problem,” which was written by the creator of it. NaNo was a bit like Inktober, where it was created by one person and wound up sort of belonging to a huge community. But whereas Inktober’s creator has pulled in the reigns, for whatever his reasons, and edged out a lot of the creators who joined in the fun before, NaNo seemed to become more of a non-profit in ideas and ideals. I don’t know if it’s technically counts as one, I haven’t looked that close, but it does offer merchandise and other things that are meant to fund educational things for kids. I really like the idea of it, but since my funds are often pretty bleak, I haven’t done nearly enough to support it in that way. I wonder if I could put it in the spot where my Amazon orders go towards a charity of my choosing.
NaNo really is such a community thing though. Each year (or session, as I’d mentioned Camp NaNoWriMo runs in a couple of the summer months) they open up message boards so you can find like-minded writers and build little support groups. Some of them are based on location, others on genre, some on age, and so on. There’s a group in one of the towns close to me that has a Facebook group that I’ve been in and was rather actively meeting up regularly, but they have quieted a lot since coffee shops and cafes closed down and public gathering became a danger. I’d never worked up the nerve to go to one of the meet-ups well before that was the case though. As I said a few posts ago, I don’t know how to share my writing with others. The process especially. It’s a shortcoming and I need to get passed it at some point.
I went into my first NaNo with a long-term idea. It was from a comic I had been working on when I first met and was hanging out with Corky, back when we both worked at the comic shop in Canton, MI. It was to feature a number of characters in a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting (with Science Fiction elements, but soft Sci-Fi, so it’s really just fantasy with technical window dressing. Star Wars, not Star Trek). It was also maybe going to use elements from some stuff I’d worked on in my time on the Prodigy boards, dealing with a magic-wielding girl and her demon sidekick.
It didn’t have a lot of substance to it. Like I’ve said, I don’t Plot well. But that was what you were supposed to forgo and forgive yourself for with NaNo. It’s right there on the book cover and the posters and the t-shirts. No Plot. No Problem!
But it is a problem. For me. And I write blind a lot. I’m a pantser (the term of people who write “by the seat of their pants”). And least I think I am, and technically almost everything I ever have written has worked that way. But it’s also almost always short stories or chapters to a continuing saga that doesn’t have to go anywhere because it’s just serialized on a BBS about X-Men or whatever. Sometimes I just write the “sweet spot” or juicy moments of a story with no real story around them. I just hear people talking, and I throw it at the page.
Which is fine. Some of my short stories are actually kind of good, even coming out fully formed. Yes, they can all use either some fine tuning or a total overhaul to make them really shine. But it’s somewhat wondrous what I can accomplish just hacking away at a keyboard when the mood strikes me.
30 days of a mood, however, is, while not impossible, at least very unlikely. My first NaNo hit around twenty-seven thousand words, with one or two scenes pasted in from when I’d first written them some ten years before in Michigan (so let’s safely round down to 25k). That’s not a bad effort really, for a first timer, both in the NaNo challenge as well as the “writing a novel” attempt. But that story hit a point where i could not pick out what these people were supposed to do next, and that deflated me.
My next attempt was a couple years later. By this time we’d moved into the house Erin and I bought (and all the agony that came with it). I don’t think I had an office at this point, I think I’d given it up to a roommate. I do remember trying to write on my laptop in bed. This was also an old story I’d wanted to do for some years, but I’d never attempted to do any of it before, and I did have, I thought, a better understanding of where it was going to go. A beginning and an end were there, but the middle was mushy and missing a lot of ingredients. If the crust of a pot pie is the “pie,” this story was missing a lot of the “pot.”
No Pot, No… That was unintentional and stupid. Let’s move along.
That year’s defeat was a devastatingly measly seven thousand words I think. Never really took off. My lead character started to develop abilities and an attitude that was outside my original vision just so I could explain away the weak points in my structure, and while I would normally have been able to just run with it, I’d convinced myself that I had “had a plan for god’s sake!” and that I’d just mucked it up too much to go any further. Fucking ruined.
Somewhere around then, maybe a little before, perhaps a little after, I tried to write a book that I had promised a friend. And this also had a beginning, an end, and some bright middle bits, so I thought i could do it without a deadline or a contest or anything. But I had gotten so accustomed to writing being easy so much of the time, that when the opening didn’t click with me, I built a wall up and buried the story that I loved the idea of so much. I’ve heard it said that if you can’t write a particular story it’s not necessarily that the story is bad or that you can’t write. It’s just not the story you need to be doing right now. That may be the case, I don’t have the experience that the writers I’m quoting have. But I do know that the story in question still haunts me, as much for the promise to my friend, but also because I think it would be a glorious tale in the hands of a better and more well-suited writer than I. I tend to think that a writer can write characters that are different from themselves, that’s the beauty of story-telling. But in trying to do this one, I felt very limited in my world view and experience and just like I was letting down my main characters because I couldn’t define their lives in the mundane parts, only the fantastical ones. And the story needed to be rooted in humanity to allow the fantasy to flourish.
My final (proper) NaNoWriMo attempt came about seven or eight years back now. I had been laid off from my retail job of twelve years that summer, and I had no real prospects of what to do next. I felt like I didn’t want to go back to the retail sector, but i didn’t think i had enough to offer the private sector as far as tech work. Turns out eventually that I was wrong, and working my first “big boy job” as my wife put it really was the most fulfilling one I’ve had. And while I had a lot to learn, I learned in doing, and I became really good at it.
But the November after I was laid off, I had nothing stopping me from doing NaNo. And thought, if I’m ever going to be able to complete one of these, it would be when I had no other obligations. Our roommates had all recently moved out, so it was just Erin and I and the two cats. I had no Black Friday build-up of stress for work. I had no worries about finding a new job at that point because my lay-off did allow me some time to figure stuff out (I took way longer than I should have probably, but in the end, Dream Job. So I can’t look at it as the wrong choice).
This story was much more a new idea than any of the others had been. I’d been kicking around a fun, action-laced fantasy story. I’d been playing D&D with my friends and had pulled in more ideas of the kinds of characters I liked to play. I also had gone with my tonal strengths of tempering humor into whatever it was I was doing. Oh, and I decided that my main character was a complete and utter prick. Which made him incredibly fun to write. And I gave him a sidekick who was both innocent and whiny and never knew what the hell was going on and a consummate victim the whole time, so I had someone to torture and that was even more fun. Two voices I knew how to write: Prick and Victim. They’re essentially both sides of my personality, and I torture myself all the time.
It mattered, of course, that i didn’t really know how to write action. It mattered again that I had a squishy plot. But it also mattered that taking the story off the rails brought out ideas on the fly that I could not have planned for. I involved a third character that I had fully intended to write out of the story in the first chapter, and discovered that I liked him way more than I would’ve thought I could and that he had more reason to exist than I’d expected him to.
And I just laughed at what I wrote a lot. Reading it now, for all its faults, and all its gaping plot and content holes, I still have a great time going back to it.
It’s unfinished. I wrote an ending, but I skipped ahead to get there, and I don’t know what the route was to get me there honestly. And fuck all if I didn’t end it on a cliffhanger to be continued in at least one follow-up book (or maybe two). That was not the plan. I wanted a one-and-done. I wanted one book I could publish or at least have a “I FUCKING FINISHED IT” banner attached and then I could move the fuck along having accomplished that one thing finally.
There were also parts where, like what this spot has become, I started journaling instead of writing the story, because I had to talk out what was going on and what I thought I’d have to do next to keep writing. And I counted those words because they were just as hard to write as any of the prose. And i really wanted my 50k Badge.
Which I won. Technicality or not, I completed NaNo that year. And I came out of it not with a finished novel, but like I accomplished a thing, and with something I don’t completely hate.
That’s good win. Long time coming, but I makes every attempt feel worth it. And It allowed me to close a chapter on my writing journey. Not the one I expected. I wanted more. But I could take this.
Oh, balls, I forgot, I did try NaNo one more time. Probably the year before we moved out of California. I took time off of my podcast for it. Was it in November? Maybe it was a Camp. I can’t be sure at this point. What I do know is that I took a different approach. I stole the plot, and I mean the entire structure, chapter-wise, of one of my favorite books growing up. And I moved it from being a fantasy story to being one about superheroes. And I got maybe as far as the second NaNo attempt. I’d been working at the new I.T. job, and while I’m not laying excuses to the work, I just slacked off and let the challenge dump. It was never a serious attempt anyway. Maybe why I forget it existed so often.
So four NaNo attempts, one novel outside of NaNo that crashed and burned too. Other things here and there of course. I have to wonder, is it losing at NaNo so many times that makes it feel less compelling to do or is it winning it the once? Is it that, even though I’ve seen a number of people take their NaNo novels and turn them into actual published works, I can’t point to anything I’ve done in the challenge and say, “Oh yes, that’s the final stage for that story. I’ma put that in print!” Even the winning book, without a co-writer to get my past my shortcomings, I don’t think it stands a chance, even at being self-published. There’s just not enough there as is.
I do think what it would take to get me to attempt NaNoWriMo again, beyond having an actual idea for one, is a serious sit-down with building an outline. I’d want a solid roadmap for next time. I’d want to plot what would happen, and why, and to whom. I’d need more info on the characters than, “Doone is a prick.” Which is literally what I wrote on my character description page for him in my Scrivener file. I may have said “complete prick,” it’s been a while. Sure, it’s his most featured and, for me at least, endearing trait. But I knew not much else about him until I started giving him shit to fuck with. So a better look into the heads of the characters could be good.
And I don’t know if it would be better to have a plan for what comes of the book after NaNo or not. It really doesn’t take much to get a book “published” these days like it did when I first started doing these challenges. If you’re comfortable doing it to your potential audience, you can put almost any stupid piece of garbage in the Kindle store. Some actually sell quite well, as sad as that is. A pen name can save you a lot of public guilt too. But that feels not only skeevy to me, but it defeats my drive of writing something I can show some pride in. I don’t expect a lot from myself, but what I want for me is elevated from where I am now. Not lowered.
As usual, this is a “thinking out loud” piece as opposed to a “call to action” one. I came to this post not planning to actually do NaNoWriMo this year, and maybe not ever again. I don’t feel sad or like I’m abandoning some dream when I say that either, which is good. I feel my failings a lot, heavy and hard. That this doesn’t seem like one is a healthy moment for me. And that I’m not completely writing NaNo off forever, or even for this year, is healthy too. It’s just another possibility. An If but not a When. That’s all right.
But it’s in my brain now, kicking around. And that I’m thinking about the possibility of writing story again… I’m kind of in love with that feeling.
